


Devil

by PragmaticHominid



Series: Falling [1]
Category: X-Men (Comicverse), X-Men (Movies), X-Men Evolution, X-Men: First Class (2011) - Fandom
Genre: Brotherhood of Mutants, Character Study, Coming of Age, Dysfunctional Family, F/F, F/M, Families of Choice, Gay and Mutant in sixties, Gen, M/M, Mutant Pride, POV Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-06-28
Updated: 2013-01-10
Packaged: 2017-10-20 19:34:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 51
Words: 141,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/216362
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PragmaticHominid/pseuds/PragmaticHominid
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In the days and months following the events in Cuba, Raven attempts adapt to her hazardous and violent new life as a member of Erik's fledgling Brotherhood of Mutants. </p><p>The other recruits – Shaw's old people – are unknown quantities, and Raven struggles to overcome her fear of these dangerous strangers who will eventually become her comrades. In the process, she is surprised to find herself drawn toward Azazel. </p><p>Meanwhile, Erik and Charles are slowly working toward reconciliation, both in their personal relationship and in their politics. They enter a period of tentative rapprochement, and begin to help one another in recruiting new Mutants into their respective organizations. In the process of doing so, the Brotherhood encounters many new Mutants, including Remy, Toad and Fred Dukes. </p><p>DEVIL is the first of three novel-length fics in the FALLING series, which will seek to link X-Men: First Class to the events of X1 and X2 (X-Men: Last Stand and the Wolverine films are not canonical to this universe). The intent of these stories is to explain how the characters we saw in XMFC became who they are in the original two films.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Within the framework of this fic, FC, X1 an X2 are considered absolute canon, and I try to remain true to the events as seen in these films. 
> 
> I've also borrowed liberally from other canons, many of which are in conflict with one another, including the comics and X-Men: Evolution. In these instances, I tend to simply use what I like and discard the rest. Therefore, the ages, relationships and so on of characters who appear in this fic but not in the films may vary from how they are portrayed in other stories.

_Damaged people are dangerous. They know they can survive. - Josephine Hart_

* * *

There was a confusing disconnect between the pieces of Mystique's life. 

She could remember how, less than a month earlier, she had cowered in a corner with half a dozen other children, crying stupid and panicked tears while the Hellfire Club slaughtered half a hundred CIA agents. Her throat had been raw from screaming for days afterward. 

Today, in her new life as a part of Erik's new Brotherhood of Mutants, she saw the people who had frightened her so badly during that night at the CIA base – who Charles and others had fought against in Cuba – a dozen times a day, in the most mundane of circumstances. 

Mystique passed them in the halls of the old Chicago hotel in which they'd set up the Brotherhood's headquarters, satisfaction with them at the table to eat meals that she and Angel cooked together. When it's her turn to do laundry, she sorts through Azazel and Janos's rumpled suits and white cotton underthings along with the rest of the group's dirty clothing. 

There's an almost dorm-like intimacy to their life in the old hotel, as sprawling as the building is. Still, they don't trust each other – not yet anyway, not completely. Angel and Janos keep to themselves much of the time, sticking close together – Mystique suspects that they've become a couple, though no one talks about that. Janos didn't talk at all, and for a while Mystique had wondered if he even could speak, before she overheard him exchanging a few words in Spanish with Angel. 

Erik was sullen and distant most of the time, even toward Mystique. It seemed to her that he was struggling to hold in his day-to-day life to the impulse that had compelled him to dub all Mutants his brothers and sisters and bring the five of them here together. Sometimes she caught him glaring across the room at the other three, and in those moments Mystique felt as though she could read his thoughts as clearly as Charles might have: He hadn't forgiven them for collaborating with Shaw. 

Mystique suspects that he didn't sleep at all during the first week after Cuba. He was always waiting for the hammer to fall, for the others to turn on him. Things had relaxed some since then, but Mystique thought that he might still be waiting. She understood what Erik was feeling, because she still didn't feel completely safe sleeping under the same roof as the others, either. 

Azazel was the only one who seemed to be taking everything in stride. He seemed completely oblivious to the currents of fear and suspicion and hatred that were flowing between the other members of their so-called Brotherhood, speaking easily in his broken English to everyone, and that was perhaps the first thing that really attracted Mystique's attention to him. 

It's when she spoke to him – just over the smallest, most inconsequential of things – that her past and present most refused to line up with one other. How could she make a small joke exchanged in the common room or an almost shy question about English grammar jive with his skill with those blades, with the deadly midnight teleportations that he had used to smash the life out all those men back at the CIA base? 

Mystique watches him out of the corner of her eye whenever she could get away with it, and she spends a lot of time thinking back to the beach in Cuba, to Azazel's tail poised above Hank's face while he held him down against the wet sand, half a second and a quarter inch from driving its needle-sharp tip through Hank's eye and into his brain, and she wondered how all of that balances against everything else she'd learned about Azazel since then. 

Azazel dressed with fastidious neatness, but he wore his socks until the soles were riddled with holes. His English was dreadful, but he could muddle his way through fairly advanced conversations, and accepted corrections (which Erik mades constantly) without embarrassment or offense. She'd found that he smiles quite often – more frequently than she ever would have expected, before – and when he smiled it was dazzling, the teeth unbelievably white against the crimson of his scarred face. 

Astonishingly, she'd found that Azazel enjoyed the company of other people – or at least other Mutants. He was often quite charming – even friendly. 

Frequently, Azazel called the rest of them his “comrades,” and that's something which made Raven uneasy, because communism was not exactly something which was thought highly of in the house in which she and Charles grew up. 

But lately the word had begun to draw a sardonic smile out onto Erik's lips, and because of this Mystique had sort of started to like it. In recent days, Erik had even taken to teasing Azazel about it, accusing him of playing to stereotypes, of mocking foreigners and the unworldly, and of wearing the word out past all usefulness. Still, Azazel persisted in making his little joke (and Mystique had become more and more certain that it was in fact a joke, though not one she understood perfectly) and she'd almost gotten used to being called “comrade.” A second new title, for a new life. 

Erik rarely framed the coming revolution with words like “comrade” but when he and Azazel spoke together about the future they seemed to understand each other well enough, all things considered. It seemed possible to Mystique that Erik and Azazel were beginning to become friends, and she hoped very much that this was true. It seemed to her that it was very important that they all should – somehow – find a way to be friends. It seemed likely that their lives might one day depend upon this. 

But it was difficult. The truth was that she didn't like the other members of the Brotherhood as much as she should – as much as she wished that she could. 

The others had been more deeply damaged than Mystique, and that made them stronger than she was – harder and more experienced. Older. They intimidated her, though she tried not to show it. She recognized now more than ever how sheltered she had been in her life in Charles's home, how his lifestyle and outlook on the world had been calculated to keep her tame and small. Mystique felt this past privilege as a character flaw that she would need to correct before she could hope to fit in with the others. 

She realized that she was on the cusp of becoming a completely different person, and believed correctly that when she would look back on herself years from now, it would be as though she were seeing a person who she had never known. 

Azazel was the one who frightened her the most, and he was the one who was most different from everything that she had known before, so she looked to him to see how to become someone else. 

But it would be a while longer before Mystique realized that he was also watching her.


	2. Chapter 2

_The 'spontaneous' state of our daily lives is that of a lived lie, to break out of which requires a continuous struggle. The starting point for this process is to become terrified by oneself. - Slavoj Zizek_

* * *

Decades later, Mystique would whisper deadly poison into Jason Styker's ear, and then she and Erik would walk away with every expectation that they were leaving Charles to die beneath Alkali Lake. 

On the flight back to civilized zones, before she realized that the plan had somehow failed, Mystique would attempt without success to find the terminus line in her life, the thing or event that had made it possible for her to do what she had just done – not to the humans, because by then she was long past such considerations, but to Charles. 

Mystique had by then walked away from Charles more time than she cared to count – in hurt and frustration and rage – but never definitively, never for good and always. How had it become possible, Mystique would wonder, with a sort of detached fascination at her own actions, for her to do something that would have in the past seemed so utterly unthinkable? What had changed?

In the years following Cuba, her path would cross with Charles again and again. He and Erik would attempt to rekindle their relationship – to find some way to make it work – and these brief reconciliations would bring Raven back into her brother's orbit. In times of crisis, the Brotherhood and the X-Men would find themselves fighting together against a common enemy, and in those good times it would become possible for her to remember that they weren't supposed to be enemies, that Charles wasn't the villain and had in fact once been her best friend and her entire world. 

But those times never lasted. Charles meant well – it was impossible to believe that he did not – but in the final balance he was more intent on formulating good Mutant-human relations then on stopping anti-Mutant violence by any means necessary. 

No, Charles wasn't the villain... but later, when the secret horrors of the Weapon-X program were uncovered by the Brotherhood (who supplied the top secret files to a predictably disinterested media), when the night raids on Mutant homes began, as Erik's predictions began to come true, one after another, the importance of maintaining this distinction would begin to mean less and less to her. 

Good intentions, she would find, became increasingly irrelevant when compared to an intolerable and untenable reality. A point came when his seemly endless capacity to engage in apologetics for atrocities committed against their own people ceased to leave her feeling hurt and confused and instead only provoked rage. Charles might be capable of calling for peace with a world where Mutants were targeted, tortured and murdered every day, but Mystique was not. 

And once it was clear that he would capitulate every time, it became impossible for Mystique to find a way to excuse herself for loving him. That love was a weakness and a betrayal to the Mutant cause, so when the breaking point finally came – when she simply stopped loving him – it came easily, with no great emotional turmoil or pain. 

But all of this was a long way off from now; decades after Cuba, though long before Alkali Lake. 

Today, in the weeks following Cuba, things were much messier. In the aftermath of leaving Charles behind, Mystique found herself plagued by guilt and self-doubt. She was badly worried about the future because – as badly as she wanted to have faith in the potentiality of a better world, one it which Mutants were safe and free – she could see no conceivable way of actually creating such a world. 

She was pretty sure that the truth was that there would be no future for any of them – for Charles's group or the Brotherhood or for any of the unknown Mutants still out there on their own. It seemed much more likely that they would be killed, probably sooner rather than later, and probably badly. This was not a notion of which Erik disabused her. 

When she had been Charles's sister she had at least had security, as tenuous as it might have been. But that was gone now, and they were very likely all wanted men and women, targets of the CIA, which had turned on them at the first opportunity.

She cried a lot, during those first weeks after Cuba, but at least no one else ever caught her doing so. It would not have, at the time, seemed wise to show that type of weakness to any of her new “comrades.” 

And anyway, Mystique hated crying, because it reminded her of Hank and how she had allowed him to hurt her. She didn't want to be the type of pitiful little girl who could be wounded by such words anymore. Raven might have been a crier but she didn't think that Mystique – whoever Mystique was – ought to be one, and she felt as though she was backsliding every time the tears won out. 

As the Brotherhood began to settle into their own headquarters – an unassuming old hotel on the wrong side of Chicago, where the neighbors were unlikely to start trouble over the blackened windows and the locked gate – as they they began to settle into each others' company, Mystique began to wonder how Cuba had looked from the point of view of the members of the old Hellfire Club. 

She wondered if Angel's wings had recovered from the burns, if Janos was embarrassed by how easily Erik had crushed him under the wall of the submarine, if Azazel resented the way she'd tricked him when he'd been fighting Hank. She wondered how any of them could have stood working with a man like Shaw, and how they could stand working with Erik now, given that he had killed their old leader. But these questions were potentiality dangerous, and so she kept them to herself. 

Frequently, she found herself contrasting Hank – poor, self-loathing Hank, who was supposed to be so smart – to Azazel. She had decided that she was finished with pretending, and so she did not allow herself the delusion of believing that Azazel hadn't intended to kill him. But at the same time – given the alliance that Azazel and the others had made with Erik after it was all over – that felt very situational. 

She had an idea that if Hank were to show up on their doorstep tomorrow – small chance, that – and ask to join the Brotherhood, that Azazel would accept his presence gracefully and without question, as he had Mystique herself. 

There was something about the Brotherhood that made for strange bedfellows.


	3. Chapter 3

_"Chicago is the product of modern capitalism, and, like other great commercial centers, is unfit for human habitation." - Eugene Debs_

* * *

The instant solidarity that had appeared between them in the minutes following the missile attack on the beach began to fade almost as soon as it was over. When you had just helped to save the world  literally saved the world, like a superhero or something  and then to have the guns of the humans you had saved turned on yourself a moment later brought a lot of things into focus. It was a clarifying experience.

In the wake of such an existential threat, it had been easy to join hands and stand together as Azazel had transported them away from that place. Later, individual differences began to intrude, their difference pasts and different personalities coming between them. Erik had always been his own man, but when they'd had time to brood over the matter, it became difficult to get around the fact that the others had been Shaw's people and Mystique had been Charles's.

These barriers came up between them at odd moments. Mystique would find herself watching Janos and Azazel, and would suddenly wonder how much they had really known about Shaw's plan, and when they had known it. If they had approved. These questions seemed especially pressing as related to Azazel. Emma's arrival added more complications, because there was no question that Emma had understood exactly what Shaw meant to do.

When Erik announced his intentions to free Emma - first in English then again in Spanish for Janos's benefit - Mystique kept quiet. She watched the reactions of the others, trying to see what they thought of the plan, what Emma had been to them. Janos and Angel had exchanged a brief look that seemed  uncertain and troubled. Azazel had only lifted his chin slightly, in a way that seemed to show agreement if not pleasure with the plan.  

She hadn't wanted to question Erik in front of the others  hadn't wanted them to think that the plan frightened her or that she was afraid to fight  but later that night she'd gone to his rooms to speak with him.

The electricity in the old hotel was dodgy, and when she knocked on door of the apartment Erik had claimed for himself the hall light overhead flickered. Erik had bought the building  less than a week previously. Chicago was overrun with empty, rundown buildings, but it still astonished her that Erik had been able to find someway to purchase such a big place quietly and outright. He'd paid in cash, and the name on the tittle and tax documents was not Erik's own. Erik had any number of skills that she could not yet see herself ever being competent enough to acquire.  

"One moment," he said from the other side of the door. She waited, hand poised over the doorknob, while the deadbolt disengaged itself with a rusty click. "Come in."

When she opened the door she found Erik seated in front of the desk in the corner, a length of cloth puddled across the surface of the desk. He turned his head to look up at her, and Mystique saw that he held several sewing pins between his lips. When Erik saw who was standing in the doorway, his window curtains slid shut, the metal curtain rings clicking against each other as they slide along the bar.  "I'm sorry about that," he said, glancing toward the now covered window. When he opened his mouth to speak, the pins floated down to a pincushion that was sitting at the corner of the desk, and stuck themselves there neatly. "I intend to have one-way glass installed in all the windows as soon as possible."

She shrugged. "It's not a big deal. I can always change form if I need to." She thought of Azazel, who certainly didn't have the luxury of being able to pass as human. Had he ever been able to do something as simple as taking a walk down a busy street? Had he ever been to a movie, or ridden in a car without tinted windows, been to a park or a zoo or anywhere where there were strange people? The thought made her feel somehow lucky and guilty at once, but mostly it just made her angry.

There was a smoldering ball of resentment located right behind her navel, which had taken flame the night Hank had tried to convince her to take his "cure" - to change herself to suit him and the society he so desperately wanted to be a part of  and which hadn't gone out since. It flared up now, reminding her of Hank; he couldn't pass anymore, either. She wondered if it was harder for Azazel or Hank, and decided on the latter. Azazel could transport himself any where at any time, but Hank would be a prisoner inside Charles's mansion. And Hank would know what he was missing out on. If Azazel felt that his highly visible mutations had cheated him of anything  had limited his opportunities or experiences  he didn't let on. He didn't seem to have any interest in such things.  

Erik seemed to read her mind. "I don't intend that any of us should be forced to remain hidden for very much longer," he said, turning back to his work on the desk.

"What are you doing?" she asked, stepped into the room. The hotel had been coated top to bottom with decades worth of grim and dust when they'd moved in, and there hadn't been all that much time for cleaning since then. Nonetheless, Erik's rooms were spotless.

He turned in his chair, holding up the pile of cloth that had laid across his desk. She saw now that it was a half-finished garment. The... thing was almost completely shapeless, made of a heavy, felt-like material in swatches of black and bright purple and crimson. Erik read her expression, and laid the monstrosity back across his desk. "Well," he said, "More's the pity that Beast did not chose to join us. I'm afraid I have no talent for sewing."

It took her a long moment to come up with anything remotely nice to say. "The stitches look very even," she said lamely.

"Yes, well, that's the easy part." Demonstrating, he picked up a length of thread. A needle levitated upward from the pin cushion, slipping the thread through its eye. Holding the garment along the pinned seams with both hands, he guided floating needle to complete several extremely neat stitches. "However, the cut leaves something to be desired. As for the palate... I'm afraid that it looked better in my imagination."

"Purple and red don't really go together," she agreed.

It was his turn to shrug. "What was it you wanted?" he asked, setting his project aside.  

"After you guys got back from Russia, Charles told me about what happened there... he said Emma Frost had shown him how Shaw was planning to start a nuclear war. He said she showed him a vision of Washington in flames, and called it 'beautiful.' He said she seemed to be 'deeply mad'  that she frightened him."

"I see," Erik said. He had become suddenly very cold, and she regretted already that she'd brought this up. "Let me ask you a question; do you consider your brother to be an especially good judge of character?"

"Well... No," she said, uncertainly, feeling the words 'your brother' as the rebuke that they were. "But -"

"We will need a telepath if we're to have any chance of success," he told her. "Without Emma's ability to block out Charles, we will be completely helpless when he turns on us."

"He won't do that," she said. "Charles won't sell us out."

Erik stared at her long and hard, unblinking. She didn't dare to allow herself to break his gaze. "If you're childish enough to actually believe that," he said softly, "then you don't belong here."

He turned back to face his desk, returning his attention to the dubious project of the uniform. "You need to understand what's coming," he told her, without looking up. She lingered in the doorway, watching him, unspoken words queuing up in a jumble inside her throat. After several minutes, Erik said, "Go to bed, Raven."

She left the room with a sense that she had postponed but not dodged complete disaster. But she didn't go back to her own rooms.

Instead, she went down to the hotel kitchen. After their own rooms, this had been the part of the hotel that they'd all been working the hardest to get cleaned up and made decent, and the room smelled of Ajax powder. There were gaps along the counters, where Erik had removed the old, nonfunctional stove and frigidaire. Workmen were coming to install new appliances in the morning; it went without saying that she would appear as a human while they were inside the hotel, and that Azazel simply would not appear at all.

Angel had gone shopping earlier in the day, Mystique knew, and now she went to the cupboard and looked inside, browsing through the cans of vegetables and beans, the tuna and spam and peanut butter, pushing aside boxes of crackers and macaroni and cheese. These were not things that had commonly been found in Charles's cupboards while they were growing up, she reflected, and then found something she had never even seen before.

She pulled it down to look at it more closely, staring at the label. It was a medium-sized Styrofoam cup, wrapped in a layer of cellophane, and the front read "Cup O' Noodles." The directions on the back called for boiling water, which she didn't have anyway of getting. Instead, she turned the tap on and let the water run as hot as it would get while she unwrapped the package. She filled the cup with water, as the instructions advised, found a fork and turned to toward the table.

Azazel was sitting at the table. She gave a small jump, almost spilling the hot soup on herself. Trying to recover her manners, she said shakily, "I didn't hear you come in."

He didn't say anything to that, only watched her as she took the seat across from him at the table. She stirred the noodles uneasily as the silence went on. When the quiet had grown deafening, she spoke simply to fill the silence. Gesturing with her fork at the cup of dubious noodles, she said, "This is something new, isn't it? They aren't quite as horrible as they look, anyway."

"Capitalism," he said wryly, with a supremely indifferent shrug. She was pretty sure that he meant that as a joke, but not certain enough to laugh.

"The world is getting stranger," she said.

"Is true," he said, and his hands made a smooth gesture that took in first himself and then Mystique. A smile tugged up the right side of his face as he did so, gifting her with the vision of just a sliver of those stunning white teeth.

"Do you think we should rescue Emma?" she asked suddenly. Once she'd asked the question there was no taking it back, so she pushed the noodles away, giving them up as a bad job, and waited for an answer.

"Emma," he said slowly, "does not need rescued." She blinked slowly, and when he saw that she didn't understand he went on. "Emma could make herself rescued at any time. She could think to the CIA holding her, 'Unlock my cell, and then shot all yourselves' or 'and then go to sleep.' Anytime she could do this."

Mystique leaned over the table, watching him closely. "Why doesn't she?"

"Emma is..." he paused, grouping for a better, more apt word. Failing to find it, he said with a sigh, "She is sad. Weak  No, not weak. She is supreme Mutant, but she wants someone to tell her what to do, always. She wants a man who says what to do." He shrugged again. "So she will not be a danger to us."

"She wanted to start a nuclear war."

"Nyet," he said, shaking his head. "No  Shaw wanted war. Emma wanted what Shaw said.

"Erik will rescue her, and then she will want what Erik wants. You will see."

"What did you want?" she asked. "The same thing as Shaw or..."

This time he smiled with both sides of his face. It was an easy, broad smile, strangely careless, given the topic at hand. It might have been the thing that made her fall in love with him, that smile. "Like Erik, I am in my heart a moderate; If the humans are willing to turn over control of this world to us, then I am willing to allow them to remain alive until the day of their natural extinction comes."

"But that's not very likely, is it?"

"No," Azazel agreed. He stood. "I am going to bed," he said. "You should do the same."

He left. After a few minutes, she took Azazel's advice and went up to her own rooms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> “Cup O' Noodles” was actually introduced to the market in 1971. But I figure if the film can be forgiven for taking certain liberties with the continuity of the Cold War, I should be able to get away doing the same with the history of junk food, right?


	4. Chapter 4

_"There will be no prison which can hold our movement down." - Huey P. Newton_

_"We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed." - Martin Luther King Jr._

* * *

The liberation of Emma Frost was almost anticlimactic. As it turned out, the hardest part was figuring out where she was actually being held, and Erik ran point on that. He had a great deal of experience in finding people who didn't want to be found, and that was a skill set that could easily be reapplied to find hidden prisoners inside secret CIA facilities. However, she'd been moved several times since that day on the beach, so it took Erik the better part of a month to find out where she was currently being held. But he did find her, at last. And once she'd been found, they needed to act fast, before the CIA relocated her yet again. At that point, the impetus of the plan fell to Azazel.

By then the hotel's  no, she corrected herself, their headquarters's  phones were up and running. When Erik called Mystique down to the lobby, which had become something of a common room for the Brotherhood, the others were already there. Angel and Janos set across from each other on a couple of couches, talking together in quiet voices. Angel, Mystique had learned, had some Spanish, though not the same dialect as Janos. It seemed that if they took their time they could understand one another well enough to get by, anyway, and they were both learning more together while Angel helped him with his English.

Azazel was leaning over the front desk, his palms braced against the stained marble surface while he studied the set of blueprints and several maps which were unfolded in front of him. Erik stood slightly behind him, reading over Azazel's shoulder. He'd already suited up in his new outfit  costume? uniform? - and a cape hung limply from his shoulders. The newly decorated helmet was held under the crook of his elbow. Mystique did not understand why there was cape or why Erik had done what he had to change the helmet.

"Yes," Azazel said, turning to look up over his shoulder at Erik several minutes later. "This can be done." He seemed to hold Erik's gaze for an overly-long amount of time. Reading something there, Mystique wondered, or trying to communicate something to him? He had seemed intensely focused on those maps a moment before, but when he spoke next his voice was completely calm, almost serene. "It will be very simple, comrade."  

"Good," Erik said, and Mystique jumped at the noise, startled. She had been so focused on trying to read Azazel that she'd almost forgotten about the others. Erik came around to the other side of the desk, and Mystique looked at him  _really looked_  for the first time that night. What she saw shocked her.

 _He's barely hanging on by a thread,_ she realized, and didn't know how she could have missed it before, because once she had noticed how nervous he was it became painfully obvious that Erik was  wrestling with a severe panic attack. His forehead was beaded with sweat; it had soaked into his hair, and his bangs hung damp and limp over his eyes.

 _By a thread,_ she thought again, but wasn't that how he'd lived his entire life up to this point? Getting by on rage and wits, always alone? But this would be something different and new for him tonight, just as it was for her. In the past, if his plans went wrong only his own life was on the line, but now he had people depending on him, people following him into the line of fire with the expectation that he would lead them through safely. But he had never lead anyone before now. _He's trying to remake himself, just like I am. And he isn't sure that he can pull it  or any of the rest of this  off._

And then she thought, _He was counting on having Charles by his side. When he stared all this, he thought Charles would be there to help him._

It was funny how quickly a person could grow dependent on Charles. He had a way of making people aware of their innate strength while  completely unintentionally, she was sure  making them feel as though that strength was dependent on Charles's patronage. She wanted to tell Erik that Charles had a tendency to disappoint people when they needed him most, but that he wasn't alone now, that the Brotherhood was behind him and wouldn't let him down  that _she_ wouldn't let him down.

But she was afraid that she'd read him wrong  she wasn't Charles, she couldn't know what was really going on in Erik's head. She might just be projecting her own feelings and fears onto him. She wanted to say something to reassure him, but it was becoming more and more clear to her by then that words without actions were meaningless. Instead, she resolved that she would show him that she could be relied upon through her actions, and grew a bit stronger at the thought that she had the power to help Erik be brave. And she promised herself that no part of this plan would go wrong because of her, and became more deeply enmeshed in Erik's vision, though she had yet to understand it perfectly.

As though he'd seen what was on her mind, Erik slipped the helmet over his head, stepping more firmly into the role he'd chosen for himself. He had done tremendously daring things in his life, worn a hundred different masks; still, when he spoke there was a forced, wood quality to his words, as though he'd over-rehearsed his speech.

"Now is not the time to force a confrontation with the humans," he said, projecting his voice more loudly than was necessary. He paced the length of the room stiffly as he spoke, the cape rustling heavily behind him. "No, tonight we simply reclaim one of our own. We will enter the facility as closely to Emma Frost as Azazel can get us, we will free her, and then we will leave as quickly as possible. We will not engage in unnecessary skirmishes." He turned his eyes on Azazel as he said this. Azazel inclined his head slightly and and spread his hands - easy consent. Then he came around the desk to stand beside Erik.

Angel and Janos stood, moving toward the others. Mystique stepped forward too, feeling almost silly. Even after everything that had happened over the last two months, it was difficult to really believe that all this was real and was her own life -

Azazel was holding his free hand out to her. She allowed herself no hesitation, and when his hand closed over her she felt him running his fingers over the back of her hand, exploring the scales and ridging. She glanced down at their hands, and saw that his nails were a slightly brighter shade of crimson than his skin; when they caught the light they shone. The patterning of the the calluses on the inside of his hand and on the backs of his fingers was odd, but then she realized with a start, _They come from working with those swords._

On Azazel's other side, Erik had taken his hand, and beside him Angel and then Janos had fallen into line, but she'd barely noticed. And then there was a sudden sensation of movement, as though the entire world had dropped out of existence, and she was falling    

  The land they traveled through was as hot as flame and as red as blood, and the air smelled strongly of sulfur. They were there for only an instant. Had Mystique blinked she might have missed it completely. 

    and then they were somewhere else and everything was happening very, very quickly. They were in the corridor of a bunker lined in steel. A heavy steel bast-door stood closed at end of the corridor. Erik raised a closed fist then spread his fingers, and the door swelled, the metal groaning as it expanded, warping to jam the door frame.

There was a agent standing near that door, seemly frozen in shock. He glanced around, turning his head with quick, jerking motions, trying to take everything in. His eyes were hazelnut, she saw, and round and glassy with terror. Then they locked on her, and Mystique saw those eyes flood with hate and disgust, and he reached down to his belt to grab his gun and 

* * *

Glenn knew he'd hesitated for too long  he'd been too well-trained to make rookie mistakes like that. But so many things that up until that moment he hadn't believed in had happened all at once. The blast door contorting by itself, sealing him inside the corridor without any hope of backup, trapping him with a bunch of monsters who had appeared out of nowhere with a puff of stinking red and black smoke. The higher-ups had been calling these things 'mutants'  that's what they called the frigid woman in the cell he'd been guarding, the one who walked around with her tits hanging halfway out the front of her shirt but who wouldn't so much as give him the time of day, and that's what they called the ones who'd nearly destroyed half the US navel fleet in Cuba a couple of months back  but the minute he laid eyes on this group he knew he knew what they _really_ were. The blue one, obscenely naked and as scaly and lithesome as a snake. The red one, fork-tailed and sharply dressed. They were devils, pure and simple. No doubt about it.

He reached for his gun, and the one wearing the helmet with the little demon-horns on its front made a small movement, and the weapon fell all to pieces in his hand as he drew it from his holster. "Turn your back to the wall, and place your hands over your head," the demon in the helmet instructed him  Glenn was sure he was a demon, too, though he looked normal. He hesitated again, and the helmeted devil said, "I would love to kill you. Give me any excuse."

Glenn lifted his hands above his head. He started to turn, and then his eye caught the slight of the girl, and he had an idea.

* * *

The agent reached for his gun and Erik disarmed him, and then Erik told him to stand down. Mystique thought he was going to listen. She didn't realize how relieved that made her feel until he actually started to turn toward the wall. On the other side of the twisted door, more agents were shouting, pounding at the metal with something. They didn't matter, it would take them hours to get in here. The only one that mattered was the one that was locked in here with them, and he seemed to know what was in his best interests 

And then he whirled and charged toward Angel. Later, Mystique would spend a lot of time wondering why he had done it, why he had gone for Angel. In the end, she decided it was because Angel was small and pretty. She didn't look dangerous. She must have seemed like the best candidate in the corridor for a hostage.

He got closer to her than he should have been allowed to. No one, it seemed, had really expected the man to do something that stupid. Azazel was moving, drawing his short swords, but by then the agent already had a head start and was building momentum.

He reached out to grab Angel by the shoulders, and as his fingers closed roughly around her flesh she spit in his face. Then his head was on fire, and the high, keening shrieks that came from within the flames were unlike anything human. It was almost unreal. With a movement that was almost too quick for Mystique's eyes to follow, Azazel drove one of the blades into the agent's back. The screaming stopped so abruptly that it was as though someone had turned off a switch.

Azazel withdrew the blade, and the agent crumpled to the ground. Mystique was astonished by the neatness with which it had been done; the man had been less than a foot from Angel when Azazel had acted, and Mystique had been right beside her, and yet she could see not a single drop of blood on their skin or clothing.

The others had already turn and started to walk toward a second, smaller metal door that Mystique hadn't even seen before then, and which Erik was busy tearing from its hinges. Even Angel was moving, though she hugged herself tightly as she went.

Mystique glanced down at the body as she stepped around it. The hair was still on fire, but it was beginning to smolder out, leaving behind a blackened ruin. There was a name badge pinned to his chest, displaying a few sets of numbers that Mystique figured had to do with his rank and clearance level. There was a picture of the agent on the laminated badged, him looking sternly into the camera, and the name under the photo read "Glenn Adams."

One of the hands gave a sudden spasm, and she stropped cold. Then she reached out, almost blindly, and caught Azazel by the sleeve. He paused at her tugging, turned back to look at her. One of his eyebrows  the one above the unscarred eye  was cocked inquisitively, but his expression was flat, as unreadable as that of the agent in the photo. He did not so much as glance down.

"He's still alive!" she hissed, waving the hand that was not clutching his sleeve at the body wildly. She could hear the panic building in her voice, and hated herself for it. _How did I get here?_ she wondered, not for the first time and not for the last. _I want to go home._

"This is not movie," he said back at her. He was speaking very softly, as though he didn't wish to be overheard by the others. She had the surreal impression that he was embarrassed for her, that he felt that she was behaving badly. "People do not die all at once, so quickly and easily. Nothing does." He did look down then, but not with much interest. "He will be dead very soon. He knows nothing now."

She didn't know if that was true or not, though she wanted to believe it; the hand was still groping across the smooth steel floor, and she wanted to believe that it was some sort of reflexive neurological tick. But another part of her said that it was seeking something, that she ought to give it her own hand so it would have something to clutch at, that she ought to be telling him that everything would be okay  even if he was past hearing or understanding, even if it was a lie.

She began to knell. " _Comrade,_ " Azazel said, and there was a harsh note in his voice that she hadn't heard before. She stopped  looked up at him and then toward where he was looking; Erik was sitting the smaller steel door to the side, and Angel and Janos were behind him, peering cautiously through the doorway. There could be anything in there, Mystique thought  more agents or something even more dangerous. The others might need her help  more importantly, they might need Azazel, and yet she was over here, focused on something other than the mission and distracting Azazel in the bargain. She stood quickly, before she could change her mind, and over to the others, Azazel a step ahead of her. She didn't pause to check if the hand was still moving.

When they got to the cell, she found that it was only Emma there. Nonetheless, Mystique recognized that she'd made a mistake that could have cost them all more than they could pay. _I want to go home,_ she heard her mind say again, and beat that thought down, drove it away. Home was a cage. Home was a cage, and Emma might be listening to her thoughts now.

It went exactly as Azazel had said it would.

There was still something awkward and self-conscience about Erik as he addressed Emma, but not as much as there had been an hour before. Emma didn't take one look at him and start laughing, as Mystique had been half-afraid she would. She played it coy at first, but Mystique could tell that she'd decided that she was going to leave with them the moment Erik made the offer.

Then they were lining up again, joining hands with her bothers and sisters  her comrades, if Azazel had his way - and once again Mystique found herself beside Azazel, holding his hand. There was the heart-beat travel through the land of flame and black shadows, and then they were back in the headquarters, all six of them together.

Mystique separated herself from the others as quickly as she could, leaving it to someone else to settle Emma into her own set of rooms. Anyway, she didn't think Emma would be sleeping alone for very long.

She went up to her own room, and laid on the top of the sheets with all the lights on for a long time. Mystique thought maybe she ought to cry  she wanted to cry, or at least a part of her did  but she didn't. She studied her hands, wondering that the red of Azazel skin hadn't come away to stain her own flesh.

Some hours later, when muffled sounds of night had fallen over the city, she got up again.

She knew what she had to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Seems like I don't have enough self-control to stick to one POV exclusively, so I tried something different midway though this chapters. You figure it worked?
> 
> I'd originally intended to head these chapters with quotes from all sorts of radicals, but I realized recently that so far all of those I've picked have been from Marxists (oops, lol) so this time we get to hear from the good doctor MLK as well.


	5. Chapter 5

  


_“In a serious struggle there is no worse cruelty than to be magnanimous at an inopportune time.” -_ _Leon Trotsky_

* * *

Mystique was aware that there was something problematic about what she was doing even as she approached Azazel's door. She was repeating herself. It was possible that she was reinforcing a bad tenancy to be dependent upon men and their opinions of her.

Nonetheless, she was at his door now and it seemed too late to consider retreating.

She knocked softly on the door, but received no answer. That was what she had expected; she hadn't heard Azazel come upstairs, but she had wanted to rule out the possibility that he may have teleported directly into the room.

She reached out to wrap her hand around the doorknob, and found that it would not turn. Locked.

Somehow this eventuality had not occurred to her. She stood in front of the door, disappointed and frustrated and maybe just a little relieved, still jazzed up with the thrill of her thwarted daring, and tried to figure out what to do next.

It probably hadn't been a very good plan anyway – the more she thought about it the more unsure she was that Azazel would have been pleased to find her in his room. In her former life, she'd had plenty of experience with sneaking into boys' rooms, and they always reacted to her like kids on Christmas morning, but Azazel wasn't some high school boy. He was private – the fact that his door was locked only confirmed that further – and he might have been offended or angry to find that privacy violated.

Her original plan was also beginning to feel potentially dangerous. Even the idea of sneaking around in the dark in the rooms of a man who was always armed was starting to seem incredibly foolish, now that she stopped to think about it. Azazel was so adept with those blades that Mystique did not think he would make a mistake, but startling him still seemed... like a bad plan. Asking for trouble.

Yeah, the entire thing was a bad plan, and standing under the hallway's flickering lights she wasn't sure just what she'd even been thinking. She'd had an impulse to do something extreme – something wild enough to put the agent and his twitching head out of her mind – and all that had brought her here. It had something to do with Erik, too, she decided; When she'd tried this tactic on Erik things hadn't gone as she'd originally hoped, but he had given her exactly what she'd need at that moment.  
What he'd said to her had been clarifying – it had illuminated a way forward.

 _Was that what I came here looking for, another moment like that?_ she wondered uncertainly. _If that's it then this really, really was a -_

“Bad idea,” said a voice behind her said, finishing Mystique's thought out loud.

Mystique turned toward the voice quickly. “Oh,” she said, trying to force her face into something like a friendly smile. “Emma. Hi.”

Emma looked her up and down sharply. Mystique felt judged – judged and found wanting – and hated that she should be made to feel that way when in her natural form. Even more than that, she hated that it was another Mutant who was making her feel that way, especially one who looked so bloody -

“Normal,” Emma said. The word hung between them for a long moment. Mystique wasn't sure if she should feel angry or ashamed of herself. When Emma spoke again, it was to ask, “What are you doing here?”

“I was looking for Azazel,” she said quickly, still trying to retain a veneer of friendliness – she did not want to cause a fight, not if she could help it. “Do you know where he is?”

There was this sort of poised politeness to Emma that Mystique almost envied, an air of knowing that she was better than everyone else to the point that she didn't even have to prove it, it was so self-evident. But she was brittle, too, Mystique suspected. Very brittle. “I'm not Azazel's keeper. He's gone wherever it is he goes,” she said, and occurred to Mystique that she'd just been told that Azazel was not inside the Headquarters. “But you've failed to understand my question; Why are you here?”

Emma had knocked her badly off balance by sneaking up on her like that, and Mystique was still trying to recover, but it felt as though showing annoyance or anger would be the same thing as admitting defeat. Acting nice – pretending to be slightly puzzled by Emma's rudeness rather than offended – seemed like the safe choice of action, even if they both knew it was just a game. “I don't know what you mean.”

“You're a child,” Emma said.

“I'm older than I look -” Mystique began to say, but Emma cut her off.

“Bullshit. You're a child, and you have no idea what you've gotten yourself into. You don't belong here.”

“I don't think that's your decision to make,” Mystique said, trying to keep her voice even.

“You know I'm right,” Emma said.

Mystique paused, considering what she really _did_ know. There was something very Hank-like about Emma, she decided, watching Emma's face, and that explained a great deal about her. _Projection,_ she thought, knowing that Emma was following along as she thought it. _Projection and self-loathing._

Emma didn't echo those thoughts back at her out loud, as she had some of Mystique's others.

There was a small sound from the other side of the door – the _whooshing_ intake of air that seemed happen when Azazel teleported. A moment later the door swung open, and Azazel was there, leaning easily against the door frame, fingers curled around the side of the door to keep it from opening further. Behind him she could see just a sliver of the room, the dim interior flickering with candle light.

He looked at her first, and again she felt eyes looking her up and down, appraising her, but the feeling was not maleficent, as it had been when Emma did the same. He smiled briefly, but then he turned to Emma, and his expression became more serious. “Emma,” he said. “You are well?”

“Of course,” she said, in a tone that Mystique couldn't even begin to read.  
“That's good,” he said seriously. He turned back to Mystique, his head cocked sideways in question, and keeping his grip on the door he let it swing open further. She hesitated, then slipped under his arm and into the room. Behind her, she heard Azazel say, “Good night, Emma.” The door clicked shut.

Inside her head, she heard Emma say, _He'll ruin you._ Mystique brushed this off as spite, and shook her head as though she had an annoying fly in her ear. Then she looked around the room in astonishment.

While Angel and Mystique had been furnishing the headquarters's rooms with pawn shop castoffs, he'd turned this room into a thief’s den of wonderments, draped in red velvet and crimson silks. Icons dangled from the ceiling on red lace strings, small paintings of the Saints or of Mary and her Child. Paintings and tattered propaganda posters covered the walls, and the flickering light of the candles seemed to make the figures move. The desk was littered with stacks of heavy, leather-bound books with tittles she couldn't read. She could smell incense.

“I want to show you something,” Azazel said from behind her.


	6. Chapter 6

_"People make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living." - Karl Marx_

* * *

In the coming months and years, as she began to learn more about Azazel, Mystique would find that he had... a very unique conception of property. He took things, and was unapologetic and unselfconscious about it. Nonetheless, 'thief' never seemed to be precisely the right word for what he was. 'Thief' seemed to denote both a sort of desperation and a base greediness that did not apply to Azazel's actions.

He took things that pleased him, or that he found interesting or puzzling. He did not take things because they were valuable – though they often were – or because he stood to benefit financially by possessing them, but simply for the sake of experiencing – exploring, studying, contemplating – these things personally. This was a fine distinction but one which Mystique felt was both real and important.

She could also say that she'd never known him to take something from someone who couldn't afford to lose it, and that she knew for a certainty that he'd never stolen from the Brotherhood. Sneak thieves would pass through their doors many times over the course of the years – Mutants so badly scarred by their time spent in the human would that they could not control their impulse to take whatever they could grab, even when they understood that they were among friends. These individuals were dealt with – harshly, if kinder means were not effective – but Azazel had little in common with such transparently damaged people. There would also be times when the Brotherhood found it necessary to stage robberies, most often against armored cars, which were easy game for Erik. These actions, which came to be jokingly referred to as “requisitioning funds,” were justifiable in that they were necessary for the Brotherhood's survival, but again they had very little to do with Azazel's way of taking.

Sometimes he only took little things – food, for example, both for himself and others. If a member of the Brotherhood expressed hunger in Azazel's hearing, he would often transport himself away, returning shortly thereafter with something that he knew for suspected his comrade would enjoy. Often time these offerings consisted of obvious delicacies that he appeared to have traveled vast distances to obtain. There was no question that he had not paid for these gifts.

Once, when things were going particularly badly for the Brotherhood and Erik had been visibly strained to the breaking point by the frustration of it all, Azazel had presented him with a cellophane-wrapped cake made of twisted dough which had been laced with an immoderate amount of chocolate. It had smelled so wonderful that Mystique had been able to tell just by the scent that it was still warm. “Babka,” Azazel had said, pressing it into Erik's hands, and a war had broken out across Erik's face; for a moment Mystique hadn't been sure if he would weep or strike Azazel, nor had she known which potentiality horrified her more. But he had mastered himself quickly, thanking Azazel with the stiff but sincere courtesy with which those two often treated each other.

She wondered if the thoughtless ease with which Azazel took the day-to-day things of life such as food – taking them as though the idea that he was not both welcomed and entitled to them had never crossed his mind – said something about the way in which he had spent his childhood, but she did not ask. Within the Brotherhood, to ask too many questions about someone else's past life was to invite trouble. And she was painfully aware of the relative privilege of her own childhood, how poorly equipped that left her to really understand so many of the trials and struggles the others had gone through, almost to a number.

Many of the other things he took were nearly as basic as food; small trinkets and books, on the main. These he claimed to return when he was finished with them, and indeed his stacks of books rotated with astonishing regularity, though some volumes seemed to remain on his shelves indefinitely. She would not begrudge him for taking these books – or anything else. His social possibilities were so very limited, she felt that any means he used to occupy his mind, if only with the company of books, was justified.

However, sometimes he borrowed rare treasures of invaluable worth – historical artifacts or great works of art. There would be times when she would enter his room to see Faberge eggs lined up across his desk like regiments of toy soldiers, standing at attention on their gilded little legs, or when she'd find him caressing the flat of a clearly ancient sword. These sorts of things would always be returned from wherever he had gotten them in short order, but there would be times when works of art by masters so famous that even she recognized them would hang on his walls for weeks on end.

But this was all a long time in coming, and today he still had the capacity to astonish her with his audacity.

He had said, “I want to show you something,” and as she turned toward his voice he stepped toward his bed, a luxurious nest of red and black silks, and flicked on one of the bedside lamps. Some of the shadowy magic went out of the room. He turned back to the bed and lifted a long, flat object from among the pillows. The package was rectangular, almost as long as Mystique was tall, and wrapped loosely in linen cloth. When he began to unwind the length of cloth from around the painting's frame, she gasped.

“Where did you get that?”

He sat the length of cloth to the side, pooling it near the foot of his bed, and leaned the painting upright against the headboard. He did all this with perfect caution, treating the framed canvas like the incalculably valuable work of art that it so obviously was, but at the same time he handled it as though he did things like this all the time. He glanced back at her before finally answering her question. “Venice,” he said, as though that explaining anything, “at Basilica dei Santi Giovanni e Paolo.”

 _He stole a painting from a church,_ she thought, with a sort dull wonderment.

Azazel stepped back to admire the painting. He seemed immeasurably pleased. “Look,” he said, waving her forward, “It has something to do with us, I think. What do you see?”

She moved closer to the painting to study it. The theme of the painting was religious, and epic battle between two winged figures in the air high above a city, and the fact that great age had caused the colors to fade did little to rob the composition of life. She thought she understood at once what it was Azazel wanted her to see, but she looked more closely at the painting, meaning to miss no detail.

The first of the two battling figures was angelic. He hoovered above the second figure on slate gray wings, a sword held in his upraised arm and a bloody metal hook held in his other hand. His feet were bare but his trunk was girded in steel plate; beneath the armor he wore a flowing robe. His hair was tangled and his face flushed, eyes hooded as he seemed to contemplate how best to deliver a killing blow against his enemy.

The second figure was nude and hairless. A short tail, shaped something like a greyhound’s, sprouted from the base of his spine. As with the angel, wings grew between his shoulder blades, but they were stubby, tragic things; they looked almost as though they had been plucked. It did not seem to her that those wings would be able to hold his weight airborne, and in fact the figure seemed to cling to the hem of the angel's robe as though to keep from failing as he brought a hand which clutched a small and crude-looking blade toward the angel. His skin was a deep shade of red, and Mystique wondered if it had been crimson back when the painting's colors were still bright and vibrant.

“'Saint Michael Vanquishing the Devil,'” Azazel said from behind her. She had almost forgotten he was there; the idea that had stuck her while she was studying that painting was so exciting, so revolutionary – she turned to ask him how old the painting was, and as though he understood what she was thinking he answered before she could speak. “From the sixteenth century. Is that not interesting?” She felt him step closer, reaching around her shoulder to motion at the devil, the tips of his fingers hoovering just above the delicate canvas. “He looks something like me... Well, I am somewhat handsomer, I hope.” He was standing so close now that she could feel his breath on the back of her neck as he spoke, and she could think of no safe answer to that statement.

Instead she said, “They could be Mutants.” It was an astonishing thought; she could literally feel things shifting around her brain, reframing her conception of herself and where she had come from.

“Perhaps,” he said, and there was something in his voice that made her think that her answer had delighted him. “Shaw said that we were 'the children of the Atom' but I do not think he believed it. He and I – even the young ones like yourself – were born years and years before the atom was freed. And so, I think that we have existed for a very long time. We've been here all along, but they called us differently before. Monsters and witches, saints and angels and demons. Devils.” She glanced back at him and saw that he was smiling in a self-satisfied way; for as long as she would know him, she would never see him express anything but pleasure with who and what he was.

“Yes,” she agreed. “Yes, and -” but then she found her attempts to give voice to what this revelation meant to her stimied. “And it explains so much...” she trailed off lamely, but then tried again, “But I think there are more of us now than there have every been before, don't you?”

“More,” he agreed, “and more and more every day.”

“He's spitting fire here, isn't he?” Mystique said, circling the devil's head with a motion of her finger.

“Hard to see, but I think – yes,” Azazel agreed. “Like our own Angel.”

The events of the day seemed very far away right then, with him so close. She felt his fingers on the back of her neck, brushing through her hair. “You are very beautiful,” he said in a low voice, his lips so close that she could feel the roughness of his beard against her ear.

But then he had drawn suddenly away. She turned, a tentative smile playing on the edges of her lips, and saw that he had moved – so quickly, so silently – to the other side of the room. The shadows were darker, and he seemed to melt into them as he watched her with hooded eyes, his head turned at three-quarters profile. The hanging icons dangled around his head, swaying slightly. Her smile faded; it was chilling, how quickly he had become dangerous. She had nearly forgotten how dangerous he could be.

“Azazel...” she started, but did not know how to finish. He turned slightly to face her, but now his head was swaying slowly back and forth as he watched her, the shadows of the icons playing bizarrely against his skin, and those penetrating ice-blue eyes would not break contact with her own, would not even blink. It was all she could do not to break eye contact with him; if she had not been too frightened to look away from him, she did not believe she could have held his gaze. _I'm among wolves here,_ she thought. _This is a house of wolves._ And for the first time she entertained the idea that Emma was right; she wasn't cut out to be here, she should just go home. It was safe back at home, Charles would take care of her and -

And Azazel was speaking. It was an odd thing; when he was angry, his accent disappeared almost completely, but his syntax broke down, and words which she knew he had deserted him. “It is not good that you have been making fights with Emma. You are _comrades,_ ” he said, his voice hissing with the _power_ he put in that word; it was the first – perhaps only – time that she had heard him use the word in anyway other than ironically, the first time he had meant it with complete and with deadly seriousness. “Understand this – we are not playing game -”

“I _know_ that,” she cut in; if she hadn't already knew that, she'd sure as hell figured it out this morning. “I know this isn't a game.” Why did they all think she didn't know that?

She might not have spoken for all the attention he gave her words. “There will be days – very soon there will be many days – that you will live only because she was there and fighting with you. You will need to know how to protect each other; we will all have to stand together or we will die, and maybe we will die together anyway. If you truly understood this you would not act as you have.”

She had listened to all this with a growing sense of outrage, and here was another odd thing; when she was this angry, she found that she completely forgot to be scared – that was something she would remember; it was something she could use for later. _This is bullshit,_ Mystique wanted to say. _She started it – she's picking fights with me._ But she recognized that if she said this – true as it was – she would only sound childish. Instead she said, “I don't understand where this is coming from. You weren't even here to hear what we said to each other.”

And then the answer came to her. It was so obvious that she didn't understand why she hadn't seen it from the beginning. “She was in your head just now,” Mystique said, and it wasn't wasn't a question. “Tell me what she said about me,” and that wasn't a requested.

“ _Peezdets!_ ” he spat, and she didn't need to speak Russian to understand that he'd reached the same conclusion as she had.

“She's telling you lies about me,” Mystique said flatly. “Why?”

“I have made fool's mistake,” he told her, and as he stepped out of the shadows and toward Mystique it was not at all lost on her that he had dodged her questions. “I will take care of this,” he promised. “And please – you will forgive me?”

She showed him the same courtesy he had shown her, and ignored the question. “Is she jealous?”

“ _Nyet,_ ” he said emphatically. Then he tried to laugh the question away, but Mystique could see that he had not even been able to convince himself that she was wrong. “We have been as family for so many, many years, Emma and I – even long before she met Shaw. She is like small sister to me. It is nothing like jealous.”

 _Oh god,_ Mystique thought. This type of screwed up hit entirely too close to home for her own comfort.

“I will take care of this,” Azazel said again, and now his hand was on the doorknob. “I am responsible for her,” he said, as he held the door open for her to pass through, and she thought again, _Oh god._ Her hand went up to rub at her right temple – she was getting a headache, she could just feel it coming on.

He left then to go find Emma, and Mystique took herself back to her own rooms.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> My grandma used to make babka, and I had it in my head that it was a German thing. Google claims that it's more of a Polish/Eastern European dish. Let's all pretend that Azazel made a small mistake or else that Erik's Mum liked to cook foreign dishes, because I spent way too much time trying to google a specifically Jewish German sweet. (On the plus side, I now known way more about the history of jelly donuts/Pączki/Bismarks/sufganiyot than I probably will ever need to use. I also learned that the story about JFK's “I am a jelly donut” blunder in Berlin is just an urban legend, which sort of makes me a little sad).
> 
> The internets say that “Peezdets”( Пиздец) means “That's it!” or “[this is a] fiasco.” Google translator says that it means, “Fucked.” I probably managed to use it incorrectly.
> 
> Finally, the work described in this chapter was painted in 1530 by Bonifacio Veronese. As stated earlier, the painting is titled “St Michael Vanquishing the Devil.” It can be viewed here: http://www.wga.hu/frames-e.html?/tours/venetian/michael.html
> 
> Thanks so much for reading.


	7. Chapter 7

_“Anyone who knows anything of history knows that great social changes are impossible without feminine upheaval. Social progress can be measured exactly by the social position of the fair sex, the ugly ones included.” - Karl Marx_

* * *

“I want to ask you a question,” Angel said to Mystique, three nights after Emma had joined them at the Headquarters.

The two of them were in the kitchen, putting together that night's dinner. Since they'd set up the Headquarters, Mystique had found herself spending a great deal of time with Angel, just in the course of looking after the day-to-day business of the Brotherhood. She was not the easiest person in the world to get along with – she was prickly, and quick to become angry or dismissive if she believed someone was bullshitting her – but compared to Janos's shy silences, or Emma's frigid distant, or the conversational minefields that incautious interactions with Erik and Azazel had a way of becoming, chatting with Angel seemed downright relaxing.

Mystique had never had very many friends – not good ones, anyway, not ones that she really trusted or especially missed now – but over the last several weeks she had found herself missing the _idea_ of friends. Of being around people like Alex and Sean, or like all the stupid boys she'd hung out with in high school; people who were irresponsible, or at least not too serious, and in who's company she could act silly or just chill out without having to worry about making gaffs that might reduce herself in their eyes. Almost the entirety of her social life now revolved around interactions with – Azazel was making an impression on her, the word came to mind instantly and felt much less silly than it had before – her comrades. The distinction had not at first been obvious to her, but it was beginning to become clear to her that a comrade was not the same thing as friend; she was trying to take to heart what Azazel had said about how they might well have to fight and die for each other, but did not believe that that meant that they were required to _like_ each other, as she would like a friend.

Nonetheless, she found that she did like Angel, and had begun to think of as a good friend. So when she spoke, Mystique felt familiar enough with her that she didn't even glance up from the potatoes she was peeling. She just said, “Sure.”

“Why are we the ones who always get stuck doing crap like this?”

“I dunno,” she said. “Someone has to.”

“Yeah, but why is it always us?”

“The others help out around here, too,” Mystique said, that was true – or at least it had been. When they'd first set up bad in the old hotel, everyone had pitched in to make the place livable. They'd cleared away bags and bags of rubbish, dug out rats' nests, replaced moldering carpets and yellowed wallpaper and leaky plumbing, and removed decades of accumulated dust and filth. In that last task, Janos had been especially useful – he could stir up a whirlwind that would suck up every speck of dirt from an empty room and deposit it all neatly in a trash bin. But once the rats were (mostly) dead and all the heavy lifting was finished with, the male members of the Brotherhood had seemed to lose all interest in the upkeep of the Headquarters.

“Right,” Angel said, and Mystique didn't have to look up to know that she had rolled her eyes. She'd been more snappish since the thing at the CIA base, more on edge than usual. They hadn't talked about it. She didn't think Angel _wanted_ to talk about.

Behind her, she heard Angel open the door of the stove to check the progress of what was inside it. She closed the door, harder than was strictly necessary, and began again on the same theme. Her voice was cutting. “These guys here, they aren't as different from normal guys as they'd like to pretend. They don't think. They've got this whole brave new future that they're planning, and it hasn't even dawned on them that maybe – just maybe – Mutant women won't be pleased to spend this shinning new era in the kitchen.”

“I don't see a problem,” Mystique said, not entirely truthfully; the fact was, it did bother her, but she didn't think it was worth making a stink over. The Brotherhood was new – it was a fragile, embryonic thing still – and she didn't want to be the one to sow seeds of discontent over something as frivolous as the distribution of housework. She didn't want Erik or the others to think that she was lazy or a shirker. “I like helping out around here, being useful. Cooking and cleaning might not be glamorous, but the Brotherhood couldn't function without us.”

Angel scoffed at that. She had had a way of being ahead of the curve, Mystique would reflect decades later. In the future she would take her place as Erik's strong right hand, after all the men he'd first depended on had fallen or failed or abandoned them, and she would find herself capable of fearlessly doing things that she couldn't even imagine now. She would pilot helicopters through rough skies to precarious landings, plan and conduct espionage operations, carry out targeted assassinations and deep cover missions and prison breaks. And when she had done all that and more, she would look back on this time, and wonder how she could have been content to accept a role in the kitchen.

But now it was 1962, and she was not yet nearly as radicalized as she imagined herself to be, and Angel's questions made her uneasy. So she deflected them, shifting the subject in another direction. “You're complaining about our guys, but you seem to be getting along pretty well with Janos.”

“I need a smoke break,” Angel said decisively. “Coming with?”

“Sure,” Mystique said again, and put down her knife to follow Angel out of the kitchen.

“Anyway, you're one to talk,” Angel said, as they headed toward what had been the delivery entrance, back when their Headquarters had still been a busy hotel. She wondered if the Brotherhood would ever be large enough to justify taking on supplies by the van-load, and couldn't picture it. And she wondered how many new Mutants Charles had been able to recruit by now; more than they had, she was sure of that. Hank would have rebuilt Cerebro by now - they would have their pick of any Mutant they wanted, would be able to reach the brightest and most promising Mutants anywhere in the world before the Brotherhood even knew that they existed.

“I don't know what you're talking about,” Mystique said, though she most certainly did. She transformed as they approached the door, becoming Raven again – or at least, someone who looked like the girl that Raven had been.

“What, you're going to pretend that you aren't even interested in _him_?” Angel didn't say this name; they both knew who she was talking about. “ _He's_ into you in a big way. Don't act like you haven't seen the way he's been looking at you.” She held the door open from Mystique, then ducked into the shelter of the door frame to light her cigarette before turning back around. The alleyway was nearly deserted – nothing but garbage, scrubby overgrown brush and a few parked cars which didn't look like they'd be moving any time soon. She could hear children playing on the other side of an aged picket fence, and the sounds of cars moving along the road out front.

“I've noticed.” In fact, she was keenly aware that she was being pursued. Azazel was not a telepath, but he obviously had some way of sensing where people were, at least within a certain range, and since that night in his room he'd managed to be just about everywhere she was. He was smooth about it in a sort of we-both-know-better kind of way, pretending that it was only through happenstance that they kept running into each other in the halls, the dinning area, the common room.

“I was,” Mystique said. “I was _really_ interested... at first. Actually, the other night I thought that we might end up... you know. But Emma derailed it.”

“Of course,” Angel said. “Why would she want to be miserable alone when she could drag other people down, too?” Mystique did not understand exactly what Angel meant by that, but she was too busy thinking about her own troubles to question it. Later, once she had put all the pieces together – once she had figured out exactly what was going on with Erik and Emma, and what had gone on between Charles and Erik before that – she would wonder how she could have possibly been the last to have caught on. She would feel betrayed by Charles – he'd locked her out, hadn't told her what was happening in his life. There were a lot of situations with Erik that she might have handled better if Charles had thought to explain.

“But I'm starting to think that might have been a good thing, you know? He got... weird,” she said, though she'd really wanted to say _scary_. When she had been in Azazel's room, she had not at first been able to place the look he had given her when Emma had told her lie, that hooded look that had seemed to peel back her skin to examine her bones and everything that was inside. But later, when she had been alone in her own room, she had placed it; during Shaw's assault on the CIA base, hadn't she seen him study some of the CIA agents in the very same way, with that cold and prying look, just before he'd killed them? The realization had hit her like a splash of cold water, and when she had finally managed to fall asleep she'd had dreams of falling – of being dropped. “He's too intense, you know?” she said, trying to sound nonchalant. “I don't think I'm ready for anything like that right now.”

“Yeah?” Angel said. Mystique glanced at her and saw that she was lost in her own thoughts, drawing listlessly on her cigarette, eyes unfocused and distant. She wondered if Angel was thinking about what had happened in the CIA base, with that dead man named Glenn. She did not believe that what had happened was Angel's fault. The man should not have tried to attack her. If he had done as he had been told, he wouldn't have been hurt - they would have had no _reason_ to hurt him. She wanted to say this, but didn't quite know how. “Can I ask you another question?”

“Sure.”

“You're adopted, aren't you?”

“Sort of,” Mystique said, and when she saw that Angel wanted her to clarify that, she added, “Charles found me. He convinced his parents that I was theirs.” She put two fingers up to her temple, miming Charles. “He convinced his parents that I had always been their kid.”

She'd love him from almost the first moment she'd seen him, and she'd been she'd believed it when he'd said he'd take care of her; little fool that she'd been, she'd believed that she was lucky to be taken care of after having been so alone. But it had scared her so bad, the way Charles's mother and step-father reacted when they'd first seen her. Charles had told her that it would be alright, and she had believed that, though she hadn't known how it could be. They'd come through the doors of the mansion, back from some holiday abroad, and when they'd first seen her they'd look a bit puzzled. Then Charles had said, “You've both missed Raven very much, haven't you?” and his step-father had scooped her up off her feet and spun her a circle and hugged her, and Charles's mother had lean in over her husband's shoulder and called her precious and kissed her on the forehead, sweeping back with the palm of her hand the pale blonde hair that she and Charles had decided would be a part of her default appearance from then on.

It was like Charles had _made_ them love her, and that had scared her as bad as she'd ever been scared, because – even as young as she was then – it had made her question the reality of her own feelings toward Charles. She'd borne through the false familiarity of his parents' touches and words like a baby rabbit in the hands of well-intentioned children, too terrified to even try to bolt, but when she and Charles had been alone again she had been angry. She had screamed at him, made him vow a dozen times he would never do something like that to her. “They're your parents, not mine,” she said again and again. “ _How could you do that to your parents_?”

All his excuses had simply boiled down to nothing more defensible than that he had to do it so she could stay with him. And then he had started crying, and that had forced her to stop being angry and to feel bad for being so angry instead.

She'd gotten used to Charles's parents thinking that she was theirs, and eventually she'd even started to like them a little bit. They weren't such bad people. Though Charles's mother was a firm believer in Better Living Through Chemicals, chasing the promised ups and downs of every new prescription drug like they were the gold at the end of the rainbow, but between the distraction of the pills and her purely organic narcissism she didn't impose herself too much in either of their lives. Charles's step-father was childish even in Mystique's youthful estimation, a frat boy who'd never had to grow up, but drinking made him silly instead of mean, and he never tried to hit her or anything else bad. And anyway, they were almost never home.

In the coming decades, when the media would claim that Charles's was the good guy, a firm ally against the evil Mutant menace and someone who had always believed that humans and Mutants were equal, she would remember how quick Charles had been to violate the minds of his own parents – to use his powers against them, even if he'd never admit that was what he had done – for the sake a little Mutant girl he barely knew.

But now Angel was speaking again. “So do you remember your real folks at all?” She hesitated, then said, “Like, were they were from or what they looked like or anything?”

It was not difficult to figure out exactly what she was driving at. It felt like a slap in the face, that question, like Angel – who had spent so much time around Mystique while she was in her true form - had said to her, _Tell me what you are really, because I don't believe in what you've shown me._

But she tried to keep her voice even when she said, “No, I don't remember anything about them.”

“Nothing at all?”

“No, nothing,” she said. “I don't remember anything from before I met Charles,” she told Angel, and believed it, but there was a faint voice in the back her mind that said, _I was Raven when he found me. Raven... Dark House._ But those words didn't mean anything to her – they weren't a name, couldn't be more than her own melodramatic invention.

“I decided to look like this,” she went on, motioning at herself, feeling weak for having chosen to take on such a conventionally pretty aspect, “because I had to pass as Charles's sister.”

“It's hard to believe that he could pull that off,” Angel said. “I mean, even beyond making them think you were their kid, there's so much paper work he'd've had to get right. All sorts of things like that.”

“Charles is powerful. And he's smart,” she said, and then to change the subject she asked, “What about you? What was your family like?”

That Angel had been a stripper wasn't a secret. To Mystique that seemed to say 'broken family' and 'bad childhood,' so when Angel said, “My parents always loved me,” she was strangely surprised. “They always loved me, and they were always good to me, and I miss them,” she said. “But I can't go back. I think it would kill my Mama if she knew half the places I've been, never mind where I'm going.” She flicked her cigarette away.

That seemed so fatalistic that Mystique didn't know how to respond. Before she could think of what to say, the door behind them came open, by just slightly. They turned toward the sound, and Mystique saw a single eye – pale blue against a crimson field, its pupil dilating in the bright sun - looking at her through the cracked door. “Angel. Mystique. I am glad to have found you,” he said, as though he hadn't been able to knew exactly where they were. “Erik wants to talk with you.”

“Why?” Mystique asked.

She could only see a small sliver of his face, but from the way that tiny bit of visible lip arched upward she could tell that he was smiling at her. “We are going on trip,” he said. “Erik will say more – you will see.” He retreated further down the hall, so they could come inside without any risk of someone happening to spot him from outside.

As they followed him down the hallway, Mystique mind returned to the questions that Angel had asked. Why couldn't she remember anything of her life before Charles? Had he lied, done something to make her forget? _Dark House,_ she thought again, though that didn't feel exactly right. The words felt important, as though they had some meaning, but she couldn't -

As they approached the common room she heard Emma speaking. “There are three storage sites there,” she was saying. “Here, here and there. The first two are mostly gold stores, though there are false papers here. The third is larger – Shaw squirreled away quite a lot there. Gold, of course, but also some fine works of art and some heavy explosives -”

They stepped into the room and Emma fell suddenly silent. Mystique saw that she and Erik were at the old hotel's front desk, leaning over a set of maps, just as Azazel and Erik had a few days ago when they were planning Emma's release. Emma shook her head, as though trying to free herself of some distraction, then went on. “The La Rioja store is...” she said, but then stopped again.

“Jesus Christ,” she said turned around to glare at Mystique. Her next words were spoke in a clipped, brisk manner, as though she was explaining something that was entirely too simple for her to be wasting her time on, and she wanted to finish with it as soon as possible. “Xavier didn't make you forget anything, you simply chose to suppress it. Everything's still there, if you want to access those memories again that's something we might discuss when I'm less busy. As for the business of 'Dark House,' the word you are trying to remember is 'Darkhölme.'” She spelled it. “It's your surname, and I believe that it is German, though I'd have to look more closely to be certain. Now if you could please -”

“Emma,” Erik said, and there was something dangerous in his voice that Mystique did not like.

“Her thoughts are _too loud,_ ” she said to him, her voice still clipped and cool, though frustration was beginning to bleed in now. “And she has to agonize endlessly over every single little thing. I can't hear myself think when she -”

“Emma,” Azazel said, and that stopped her, though there was no threat in his voice that Mystique could read, “why don't you tell our comrades were it is that we are going?”

But Angel spoke first. While Emma had been talking she had gone around the desk to stare at the maps. Now she looked up again at Mystique. “Argentina,” she said.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh, look. 3,500 words of flashbacks, flashforwards and talking. Well, I suppose I warn you that this was a character study, didn't I?
> 
> PS, bet most of you didn't know that Marx's default setting was pretty much snarky all the time.


	8. Chapter 8

_"People do not like to think. If one thinks, one must reach conclusions. Conclusions are not always pleasant." - Helen Keller_

* * *

It was a strange and unsettled night, and the city on the other side of her wall was restless in the heat. In the coming decade, when Chicago would find herself burning time and time again with the indignation of the city's trampled down and disinherited, Mystique would remembered how the air then had felt like it did tonight, how everyone had seemed to sense that something big was in the works, something that was neither right or wrong but simply inevitable. It was not a gentle city, and as she laid in bed, sleepless and brooding over Argentina and the coming day, Mystique wondered if that was why Erik had brought them here.

"What's in Argentina?" she had asked, earlier that that afternoon. She had decided to ignore what Emma had said; there was a lot about it that she would need to think out, but that could wait until later. She'd gone over to the desk to look at the maps, but hadn't crowded in around Erik and Emma; it was clearly their war council, and she didn't want to get in way. There had been plenty of standing room left around the desk, but Azazel stepped up directly behind her, standing closer than he needed to be while he looked down at the maps from over her shoulder. She decided to ignore that, too.

"A great deal of Nazi gold, among other things," Emma said. As she explained the plan, it struck Mystique how smoothly the three former members of the Hellfire club functioned together, now that they were focused on a mission. They were a unit and they understood each other, and each knew the others' strengths and weakness. Emma took point without discussion, mapping things out and charting their course of action. Janos listened intently, interrupting only rarely to request clarification _en español_  Mystique had come to understand that he so often remained silent because he was worried about making mistakes, embarrassed whenever he mangled a bit of grammar or used a word improperly. But he was working now, and that seemed to bring out an intense focus in him that drove away his shyness; and when he forgot to be self-conscious his English got that much better. She'd glanced up at Azazel and saw that, though his expression was more detached than Janos's, he was listening just as closely.

 _They're professionals,_ she had thought. So was Erik, and that was why he had been able to integrate himself with them so quickly. Since the raid that had freed Emma he had cemented himself more firmly than ever in a leadership role; he bore success well, and the rest of the Brotherhood had fallen in behind him almost without comment. He'd stood beside Emma, watching her as the others were. The plan was almost entirely Emma's work, Mystique had little doubt, but she had crafted it to suit Erik's goals.

 _Professionals,_ she had thought again, and paid close attention to see how to become the same. She felt badly out of place, watching the other four work out a course of action as though it was all old hat to them. She looked back at Angel, and from her guarded expression and the way she'd kept back from the rest of them, Mystique thought she felt the same way.

Emma had explained for Mystique's and Angel's benefit that Shaw had kept at least a dozen safe houses spread throughout the world, but that several of these were located in Argentina, where a number of his old "colleagues" had gone to ground after the war. She pointed out the cities in which the safe houses were located on the maps, describing from memory the plunder that had been hidden at each location, which was extensive; when the Nazi leadership had fled they'd taken just about everything that wasn't nailed down, and Shaw had managed to come away with more than his fair share, mostly in the form of gold bars and hard currency. The safe houses also held some weaponry and explosives  Shaw had little use for such things, but they kept the men Shaw had guarding the houses feeling secure  at least from outside attacks. The guards had a pretty good idea of what Shaw could do, so Emma was pretty sure they would still be there, though it had been quite a while since anyone had bothered to check in on them; they knew better than to run, and didn't have a lot of options on where to run to, anyway.

Emma was not exactly explicate about it  she was almost coy on this point  but after a few minutes Mystique had come to understand that the guards Emma was talking about were fugitive SS officers.

"We don't need them anymore," Emma had told the room at large, and Mystique had understood that she meant both the safe houses and the men guarding them. "Azazel should be able to handle these three sites alone."

Azazel had nodded at that. His face remained serious, but a sort of cold amusement had come into his eyes.

"Good," Erik said, and Mystique had realized with second-hand embarrassment that everyone was watching Erik to see how he was taking this entire line of conversation, though some were trying to be more subtle than others. Well, everyone but Emma, but then she didn't have to read Erik's face to figure out what was going through his head, did she? Mystique was watching him, too, and was ashamed of it, but couldn't seem to stop herself from doing so. He had not been especially open about his past with any of them, but Charles had a nosy brain and a loose tongue, and she believed he'd told her some things that Erik would have rather had kept private. And no one could miss the tattoo on the inside of his forearm.

Azazel's look was the most frank; he studied Erik with that gaze that seemed to dissect the emotions of the person he was watching, and said, "I am welcoming company."

"I'm sure that you're fit to handle a dozen old men," Erik replied, and though there was nothing in his voice that Mystique knew how to read the answer seemed to please Azazel, because he smiled. "But I do have half a mind to send Mystique along with you; she could use the extra field experience."

"No," Emma had said, before Mystique even had a chance to process what Erik had said. "I'll need her at the fourth site." And that was when Emma had explained about Shaw's bank vault in Santiago del Estero. "I can make the bank's employees believe that all our paperwork is in order, but I can't cloud that many minds into believing that I'm someone I'm not." Mystique was to go with her, poised as Shaw so they could get into the vault and empty it.

Mystique felt rising panic. There was something about the plan  not just the part about the bank but all of it  that struck her as wrong, but she felt stymied, unable to articulate even to herself what it was that she was resisting -

"This is the easiest thing you will ever be asked to do," Emma told her. "It's a simple mission. If you aren't cut out for it, then you don't belong here." Mystique looked at the others and saw that Janos and Azazel felt the same way; they were looking through her, like there was nothing substantial to her. And Erik, who was the one who counted for the most, was looking at her the same way.

"I can do it," Mystique said, and the anger rising in her made her believe that she really could, though seconds ago she had doubted it. "That's not it." That's not it and you know it, she added silently, projecting the thought at Emma with all the mental force she had.

Her thoughts had been in a jumble, intimidated by how quickly things were moving, the sudden pressure to prove herself, and she had fallen under Charles's shadow again. Arguments that she knew were his had raced through her mind and had nearly gotten past her lips; ideas about the legitimacy of law and the desirability of contacting the proper authorities to handle the matter of the SS men.

 _Fair warning,_ Emma thoughts came back at her like a splash of cold water. _You're about to say something that will devalue you in Erik's eyes forever._

No, she realized, Erik would not have forgiven that sort of idiocy easily. Now that she was thinking about it, Mystique figured that she owed Emma a debt of gratitude for warning her  Emma could have let her hang herself, after all.  

So she had taken a deep breath, paused to find exactly what it was that she had _really_ wanted to say, and said, "I don't think I understand this plan. We're going to take back everything Shaw and those SS men stole, but keep it for ourselves? I don't understand how we can justify -"

"Simply," Emma snapped. "The world is ours. That includes everything in it."

"Do not imagine that I haven't considered the implications of this course of action at length," Erik said, with a rigid formality that let Mystique know that she had done something wrong without letting her know exactly what. Emma's hand had gone to his shoulder, strangely possessive, but Erik had shrugged off her touch with barely concealed annoyance.

Angel had been so silent through the entire conversation that Mystique had almost forgot she was there, back near the common room's entrance. The others must have forgotten, too, because when she said, "This is all so deeply fucking gross," every head in the room had turned quickly to watch her walk away.  

That had been the end of meaningful discussion. A few hours later, she had gone to bed early, but she hadn't slept. She was restless and so was the hotel around her, creaking and groaning and it settled on its foundation. She couldn't say for sure, but lying in her bed now and starring up at the shadowy ceiling, she sensed that the others were just as uneasy in their sleep. The plan had drawn attention to wounds that Erik did not wish to have acknowledged, and that had embarrassed everyone. It had thrown the weight of history across their shoulders, when the present was difficult enough.

It had been implicit in the conversation that all of Shaw's people had known the location of a number of Nazis and had done nothing about it, but this had not seemed to effect Erik or his ability to work with them. But then, Erik hid so much. It was impossible to know how to treat him.  

And what about Emma? Mystique was fairly certain that she and Shaw had been lovers, but when the battle in Cuba had come, Emma had not attempted to join him there, though from what Azazel had said it would have been easy for her to do so. Shaw had killed Erik's mother, and Erik had killed him, and Emma would understand more about then the bare bones that Mystique  had been able to patch together  Emma would know everything that Erik and Shaw had known, and possibly a great deal more. If she wasn't sleeping with Erik now she was trying to, Mystique didn't have much doubt about that, and what did that say about Emma? What did it say about Erik, for that matter?

It was sometime after midnight when Mystique heard the thumping crackle of air, originating somewhere on the ground floor. From up here, lying in her bed with the covers pulled up to her neck, the noise that Azazel made when he transported was almost like a sub-sound, a reverberation that she felt more as a vibration riding through the floorboards and up the legs of her bed than she exactly heard.  

Mystique was not especially surprised that Azazel was on the move  he kept his own hours. But when the sound came again - and then again and again in quick secession  she began feel nervous. She began to think about the falling CIA men, how quickly he had snatched them up and dropped them, and how they had screamed as they had fallen, and then she began to be frightened.

She heard Emma say again, "We don't need them anymore," dismissing the lives of Shaw's guards with a perfunctory sort of indifference, and wondered if she would ever decide the same about her  about Erik and Angel and Janos and her  and wondered more pressingly if Azazel might agree with the same pleasure he'd shown at the opportunity to get rid of the SS men if she did. _It's not the same thing,_ she told herself firmly, wishing the room wasn't so dark. _It's not even close to the same thing,_ but she had a mad desire to get up and lock the door to her room, not that it would make any difference; if he wanted in he would get in, so she stayed where she was, frozen, the blankets clutched between her fingers.

At some point it occurred to her to start counting  if he had turned against them, if he was picking them off one by one, he'd come for her last; she was the least dangerous, the one least able to protect herself, good as she was at hiding. By the time she'd heard Azazel transport five times she began to remember to breath properly. By the count of ten she was feeling guilty for having thought such unworthy thoughts about him, and by the time she'd heard him transport himself for the fifteenth time she was raging at herself for being such a coward, for having laid there in fear, spinning suspicious nonsense stories instead of getting up at once to see what he was actually doing. This had been nothing serious, obviously, but in the future that sort of passivity might get her or someone else killed.

So she got up, leaving her room to follow the crackling _thoomps_ downstairs. They were coming from the common room, and she glanced in through the doorway to see that the desk in there was piled with gold bars, at least fifty of them, alined in neat ranks. A swirling plum of black and red smoke in front of the desk told her that Azazel had left very recently. She wondered why he was making so many trips back and forth, but found that she was had very little desire to stick around and ask him when he got back. She hurried past the door and headed down the hall.

When she got to the kitchen, she made herself a cup of hot coco and sat down at the table. That was a stupid idea, the coco, because it made her sad; she had used to make hot chocolate for Charles, it was a joke between them, a callback to the night they had met. She held the cup between her hands, finding some comfort in the way its heat spread through her hands, though it was a very warm night, and wondered if she should go back home. This was not a welcoming place, and she had begun to doubt more seriously if she was at all cut out for this.


	9. Chapter 9

_Our interest's on the dangerous edge of things.  
The honest thief, the tender murderer,  
The superstitious atheist.  
-Robert Browning_

* * *

Brooding over her cup, Mystique noticed that the sounds of Azazel transporting had stopped. _He's moved on to the next safe house,_ she thought, and another ten minutes passed before she heard him return again.

She was not especially surprised when Azazel appeared in the doorway of the kitchen; this seemed to have become a habit of his, seeking her out when she wanted very much to be alone, and it had begun to wear on her. He was too hard to read, at once too mysterious and too familiar, and there was too much potential in him for violence and for... other things.

He leaned causally in the doorway, watching her with eyes that made no secret of what he wanted. He'd taken off his black jacket and left it somewhere, and the crimson silk of the shirt he wore under that jacket clung to his chest, wet with sweat. The fabric rippled when he moved, gleaming under the kitchen lights, and it was hard to tell were the silk ended and flesh began. This was the first time she had seem him without that formal, prim jacket, and she found that it was difficult to look away. His arms were corded with tight muscle, marred by more scars like the ones that marked his face.

She did not at first notice that he was bleeding. It took a long time for her eyes to make it down to his left forearm, where he'd wrapped a bit of white cloth around the cut; the cloth, which she would later realize was an undershirt he must have picked up somewhere – was nearly as red as his skin, and that was why her eyes hadn't jumped to it at once.

Azazel did not act as though anything was wrong, so she took a cue from him; she didn't stand, and she tried to keep her expression unconcerned. “What happened?” she said, jerking her head slightly toward his arm.

He came into the kitchen and sat down across from her. He had what looked like a white tackle box in his right hand, and he set it on the table in front of him, then flipped the lid open. He began to take things from the box – antiseptic and bandages and a set of scissors, a thin needle threaded with silk thread in a stile bag - and lined all this up neatly on the table. He glanced up at her from under the shadow of his brow, checking her expression, but didn't answer.

“Did you get shot?” she demanded. She wasn't sure what he was playing at, but it was frightening her in a way that made her feel angry.

He'd been untying the cloth from around his wrist, but now he paused to make a short, rough laugh. “Did I get shot?” he said, and laughed again. “No, I think that I am a little better than that.” He flipped back edges of the cloth, revealing a gash on the top of his forearm that was as long as her hand. It was bleeding heavily, but he took a tourniquet from his box of supplies and working one-handed he tied it in a lose knot around his arm.

“Do you want help?” she said, and he looked at her again and again didn't answer. He bent over his arm, taking one end of the tourniquet in his teeth and the other holding the other end with his free hand, and pulled the knot tight. The bleeding slowed considerably. He reached for the antiseptic, spun the lid off with his thumb and forefinger and poured a healthy dose over the gash. That must have burned like hell, but his expression didn't change. He took some of the sterile pads and dabbed away most of the blood and the excess antiseptic, and reached for the needle.

 _You're kidding,_ she thought, but didn't offer help that he obviously didn't want.

He finally started talking again while he was stitching up the the gash. “I am not shot, you can see,” he said, pulling the smooth edges of the cut flesh back together with the length of string. “I made mistake, is only.” His English had become very bad, and his accent worse, and that made her think that he was hurting a lot more than his face showed.

“You cut yourself,” she said, and resisted a mad urge to laugh at him; he was so serious and stoic, sitting there at the table and sewing up his own wound, that it was all so hilariously absurd. He glanced up again, and she thought that he'd read in her face what she was thinking. He grinned, a shame-faced and oddly embarrassed smile that split his entire face, showing all of those shockingly white teeth, and she thought, _That's not a handsome face, not really,_ and wondered why she had such trouble looking away, why she had such a desire to map every scar, to trace every rough feature with her fingertips, to memorize the shade and the texture and the heat of his skin.

“I made a mistake, that's all,” he said, more clearly this time. “I became... carried away and this made me uncautious... 'Uncautious' is word, yes?”

“In,” she said. “Incautious.”

He scowled at that, letting out a sigh that made his cheeks puff out. “That does not make sense,” he said.

“I know.” She shrugged.

“Well. Anyway.” He straighten in the chair suddenly, lifting up his head and giving it prideful little shake. “You should know that I am a hero. Tonight I have killed eight Nazis,” he told her, in a tone that seemed calculated to impress. “If I was normal man, I would go to tell Mossad, and they would give me very much praise and perhaps a reward. If it was still war, and I was a normal man and had killed so many, I would have medal and a promotion. Maybe I would be in parade.” Mystique had found that the word _normal_ often sounded like a curse in the mouths of Mutants, but there was nothing wistful or hurt in his speculations. She would find over time that Azazel had no sense of having been cheated by his mutation. He was simply explaining things as he understood them. _Bullshitting, Angel would call this._ “Maybe I will go and get myself a medal,” he said seriously, while he knotted the last stitch and cut the thread short. “I have a captain's hat in my room, it is very nice. Would you like to see it? I can go get it for you... or, we go together.”

This time she was the one who didn't answer. She watched him while he bandaged his arm, trying to decide what it was that they were doing here. _Does he think he's being charming?_ she wondered, _Or has he just lost too much blood?_

He frown at her silence, but she'd been at the receiving end of enough impassive stares over the last several weeks to know how to return one now. “Eight,” he said again. “What do you think about that?”

He'd asked, so she decided to tell him. “I don't trust your motives,” she said flatly. “It's no problem to me that those guys are dead – that's not the issue,” she said, because had no desire to be misunderstood on _that_ point. “But I don't think you really care about who they were or what they did. I think maybe you'd have been just as happy to have an excuse to kill anyone.”

Azazel did not deny this, at least not directly. “I see what had confused you. You believe that Shaw was a Nazi, don't you?” She didn't reply. “But you are mistaken. He was _not,_ ” Azazel said forcefully. “Shaw played stupid people against each other to get what he wanted – of course you have seen this with the Americans and Russians, I should not have to say. Erik understands this very well. Shaw made this clear to him at their beginning. If Erik did not understand this as truth, do you think we would all be here together now?”

“No...” she admitted tentatively.

“No. You have insulted me very badly,” he informed her. “You might as well have said, 'Azazel is a fascist. He is friendly with fascists.'”

“I didn't mean to do that. I can see my mistakes now,” she said, and meant it. Then she repeated the question he had asked her three nights before, “You will forgive me?”

“Well,” he said. “I will say that my arm is somewhat sore. Maybe I am cranky as old bear tonight.”

“Tonight's strange, isn't it? There's something weird in the air.”

Azazel seemed to take that seriously, which surprised her; she had expected to be laughed at. He cocked his head to the side, as though he was listening to something. “It is possible,” he said. “But maybe you are just nervous of tomorrow?”

“Maybe...” she said. The hot coco cup had grown cold in her hands, she'd quite forgotten about it. She slipped at it now, simply for something to do.

“I will be back,” he said, and disappeared in a swirl of black and red smoke. He was back again in less than a minute.

“Courage,” he explained, and set two cut glass shot glasses on the table. He took a bottle of clear liquor from under the crooked of his elbow, unscrewed the lid and poured. The label on the bottle was printed in Russian.

“Vodka,” she said.

“Best vodka,” he said. “Stolichnaya. Here you do not have this, but I have gotten it for us,” he said in a voice that seemed to expect praise. He pushed one of the shot glasses toward with his bandaged arm. She watched his face to see if the movement pained him, but he maintained an easy smile.

“Doesn't that hurt?” she asked.

He shrugged, and then leaned over the table conspiratorially. “I will tell you something... glory fades, and pride often fails, and you can not always depend upon your friends... but women love scars.

“What?” he said at her expression. “It's true. You know that this is true.” He picked up his glass, waited for her to do the same, then declared, “Your health!” and swallowed the entire contents of the glass in one quick motion.

Mystique slipped at her own glass tentatively. There was almost no taste or flavor to it. It burned in her throat, but not in a way that was completely unpleasant.

“Don't slip!” Azazel said, distraught. _“Drink.”_

“I'm new at this,” she told him. “When Charles and I used to go out to the pubs I never drank. Well, I _drank,_ but just sodas. It was too risky otherwise, you know? I couldn't risk it, you know? If I got drunk I might have slipped up.”

She wondered why he was looking at her with such sad eyes, like she'd just revealed something absolutely tragic. He couldn't have really had that much experience himself with social drinking. “Well, then I will go easy on you,” he promised, filling his own glass again. “I will not put you under the table tonight, but you must do it properly this time.

“Our friendship!” he said, raising his own glass, and this time she drank the entire shot down in one swallow, and a warm sort of comfort slid down her throat and blossomed inside her.

He had refilled her glass almost before she put it down. “Your turn,” he said.

Mystique tried to think of a good toast, but Azazel had already used up the ones she knew. She thought for a moment, and then said, “Mutant pride.”

“Yes,” he said, when their cups were empty, “That's very good. I like that very much.” He filled the glasses again, lifted his own and said, “Mutant unity.”

“I think I've had enough...” she said tentatively, because she felt as though she was having too much of a good time too quickly, and that seemed like it could be dangerous. An hour ago she would not have imagined that it would really be possible to have fun with him.

“You will not drink to Mutant unity?”

It was easy to convince her. “Okay,” she said. “But last one.” And she repeated, “Mutant unity.”

“One moment,” he said, and disappeared again. When he returned again it was with a platter of sandwiches – ham on dark brown bread – in one hand, and a bowl of sliced pickles and tomatoes in the other.

“Azazel,” she said, looking at the food uneasily. “This isn't a date.”

“No,” he agreed easily, “But if we drink vodka without eating we will become drunk.”

“Isn't that the point?”

When he smiled like that – amused and almost shy and so very happy – she found herself wanting very badly to reach out and touch his face. “It is easy for me to forget that you are American,” he said.

When the sandwiches and veggies were half gone she found that they were drinking again, and now she had the bottle and was pouring, calling out toast after toast, and at some point things began to get a little foggy.

The next morning she would remember that at one point he had raised his glass and said, “Za lyubovʹ!” with a wicked grin on his face, but had refused to tell her what it meant.

He had not structure her as being especially drunk, though he downing as much and more than she was, and she was right sloshed – maybe there was something to the sandwich thing, though it hadn't really helped her - but he had become expansive. “History is only beginning now,” he said. “And there will be things that we will all need to let go of. Russian. American. German -”

“Spanish,” she'd cut in. “Don't leave Janos out.”

“Spanish,” he'd agreed.

“The British aren't invited,” she added, thinking of Charles, but Azazel had pressed on, ignoring her; in retrospect she would be glad that she couldn't remember everything she'd said, because she was pretty sure that a lot of stupid shit had made its way out of her mouth.

“Jew. Catholic. Atheist. White. Black. Yellow.” He'd paused and added, “Other colors,” and that had struck her as hilarious, and she'd spilled the vodka she'd been trying to pour, and had had to go and a dish towel to clean it up. “These things can't mean anything to us anymore,” he'd called over her shoulder. “History starts _now_.”

Eventually he had taken the bottle away from her and had said that they should go to bed, and she'd sort of thought that he meant that they should go to bed _together_ , and right then that had seemed like a really great idea, but he'd guided her up the stairs and left her in front of her door before going on alone to his own room, and that was just about everything she remembered about the night. She didn't remember laying down in bed, but she guessed she must have, because that was where she woke up. And she didn't remember getting sick in the bathtub, but that must have happened too, because the evidence was there to greet her when she staggered into the bathroom the next morning, her head hurting so bad that she thought she was going to die.

Actually, she reflected while she was brushing her teeth for the third time that morning, trying to get rid of a sour taste that just won't go away, there was something else she remembered; when they'd passed by the common room on the way upstairs she'd paused in the doorway, looking unhappily at all those gold bar with the gleaming swastikas stamped into them. “What the hell are we going to do with all this shit anyway?” she'd demanded.

“Build,” Azazel had said simply.

“You will see,” he'd promised. “The business of tomorrow will be simple, and when it is over with I will show you something that no women has ever seen before, human or Mutant.” Something came onto her face that made him smile that wicked smile again – thinking back on it now, she thought that smile said, _You are mine already,_ but what he had actually said was, “You have a bad mind. But you will see.”

That smile had it right – she knew that already, clear as anything, even through the pounding fog of her hangover. But he had been wrong about one thing; the coming day would be anything but simple. By the time it was over she would be responsible for the death of another person, and nothing would ever be the same again.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1.) Stolichnaya is a brand of vodka that's been produced in Russia and surrounding countries since the 1940s. They continued to make it throughout the Soviet period and is still being made today. It's so awesome that in 1972 Pepsi struck a deal with the Soviet government for the right to market Stoli in the west, in exchange for the importation of rights to Pepsi soda.
> 
> 2.) I feel like I picked up that line about scars somewhere else, but can't remember where. It's probably not 100% original.
> 
> 3.) _Za lyubovʹ_ means "to love."
> 
> 4.) Look, I know that I've been blueballing the internets, and I promise that I'll stop that pretty soon, okay? Thanks for sticking with this so far, I know some parts have been dry and others are somewhat muddled.
> 
> 5.) This chapter might be one of the best things I've ever written in my life.


	10. Chapter 10

_James Joyce is right about history being a nightmare - but it may be that nightmare from which no one can awaken. People are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. - James Baldwin_

* * *

Mystique made her way down the stairs slowly, muddy-headed and unsteady on her feet, one hand clinging to the banister. Beneath the steady, maddening drumbeat of her hangover, her thoughts were a broiling turmoil of panic and self-disgust. She was a complete disreputable mess this morning, and she had no illusions about her ability to hide that from the others. Worst still, she was by no means certain that she'd be able to perform as expected during the day's mission; she'd always had trouble maintaining a disguise when she was feeling tired or sick, and she couldn't remember the last time she'd felt this miserably exhausted.

Her stomach did sick cartwheels out of sync with the throbbing in her head as she considered her options. She couldn't fake sick; Azazel already knew better, and it wouldn't take Emma more than a second to figure the same out for herself. She could tell the truth  she'd fucked up, gotten truly and well plastered for the first time in her life, and now wasn't at all fit to work  but the thought of how badly that would disappoint Erik terrified her; he had a way of writing off people who had disappointed him.

The other option was to try to tough her way through the day, but that felt more grossly irresponsible than even begging off would be. If she messed up  if she messed up while everyone was counting on her and her eyes flashed yellow or her fingertips turned blue... _The results didn't bear thinking,_ Charles's voice said in her head.

She was at the bottom of the stairs now, and she could hear voices in the hall, up around the corner, Emma and Erik working out some final logistical points. _What am I going to do?_ she wondered, steeling herself to go around the corner.

 _Think about where you need to be in the morning first before you get sloshed next time, I should hope,_ Emma's voice replied in her head. _Shall I?_

 _Shall you what?_ Mystique thought back, suspicious. She could feel Emma moving around in her head, adjusting things; the pain in her head receded to a dull and distance ache, and some of her fatigue seemed to drop away. _Oh God  thank you,_ Mystique thought, only mildly disquieted to learn that it was that easy for Emma to tamper with her internal brain chemistry.

Emma didn't reply, so Mystique rounded the corner and joined her, Azazel and Erik, who had his own plans in Santiago del Estero that day. The others were already set to go, and though they'd all seen her transform before they watched her with a sort of fascination that made her feel both proud an a little too exposed as she took on Shaw's form. Erik especially was staring at her strangely, his face a guarded mask that might have hidden anything. When he was that she was staring back at him he looked away.

Emma looked her over appreciatively, and  more out of fussiness than anything else, Mystique believed  advised a few tweaks to the hair and clothing. And then they were ready to go, and it was not lost on Mystique that, when they all linked hands, Erik ended up on the opposite side of the line from her. Azazel had no more than dropped them in a dark alley and transported himself away when Erik too left, turning down the corner of the alley with no more than a raised hand in farewell. He was dressed in a white linen shirt, a jacket poised negligently on the edge of his shoulder, and through the thin cloth Mystique could see how tense his shoulders and the muscles of his back were.

 _This thing with Shaw needs to be put to bed,_ Mystique thought, brushing Shaw's brown hair back from his high forehead. Then, when Emma took Mystique's arm and curled it around her waist, leaning in against Mystique's flat chest like the space was custom-made for her, she thought, _And not just with Erik._

 _Don't go reading too much into this, Emma projected. It's just how anyone who'd seen Sebastian and myself together would expect us to act,_ but Mystique wasn't at all sure that was all there was to it. _Emma is sad,_ she heard Azazel say again, and tried to keep the memory soft, so Emma wouldn't pick up on it.

Perched very prettily on Mystique's arm, like nothing so much as a glittering ornament, Emma lead her our of the alleyway and onto a crowded and dusty street. Somehow the city was not as foreign as Mystique had expected. She could see farmers leading heavily laden donkeys across lines of traffic and bicycles, and some Indian women were seated on the ground at the edges of the road, selling souvenirs that they had displayed on colorful woven blankets, and the earth was golden and red, but there was much of Europe to the city as well. Many of the buildings were of white granite, huge and domineering. Most of the people she saw on the street were white, professional men dressed as Erik had been and groups of tourists. She could hear people speaking Spanish, but also a great deal of English and German as well as other languages that she did not recognize.

The tourists seemed to have a talent for getting in the way of everyone else's business. They were loud and disruptive  though not intentionally, she didn't think  and they had a way of stopping to stare at things or people suddenly, disrupting the flow of foot traffic. If not for Emma, Mystique had a suspicion that she might have found herself being just as obnoxious as the others, because the sights and sounds and smells of the place where overwhelming. But Emma lead her through the tangle of bodies and animals and vehicles with easy poise, without giving the slightest impression to onlookers that she was not the one being guided by her man.

On one street corner an ancient Indian woman was perched on a rickety chair in front of a small wooden table, on which she had displayed a dozen necklaces. The chains were only cheap copper, but attached to each chain was a gleaming piece of polished amber. "These are so beautiful!" Emma said, and suddenly her voice, which was usually as sharp and direct as a scalpel blade had become bubbly... almost silly. _We are supposed to be acting like tourists,_ Mystique reminded herself, but still she wondered which was the real act.

The proprietor had a rounded face with high cheekbones, and brown skin that was networked with wrinkles and as dry and hard as old leather, and her eyes had lighted up at Emma's exclamation. Emma addressed her now in halting Spanish. Though Mystique could not tell exactly what she was saying, she knew that Emma's Spanish was better than she was letting on to the old woman, because she had watched Emma and Janos holding rapid-fire conversations.

The Indian woman smile widely at her, displaying a mouthful of surprisingly well-preserved teeth, given her event age. She seemed to appreciative that Emma had made the effort, and said,   _"Gracias,"_ before switching to English to address herself to Mystique. "You want to buy a beautiful necklace for your beautiful girl, yes?"

And Emma had turned her eyes up at Mystique and said, "Please, darling?" and a strange feeling had gripped Mystique as she'd reached into a pocket that was not really a pocket but rather an extension of herself and took out the wallet Erik had given her before they'd left the headquarters. No matter how important it was to maintain their act, this was all a bit too weird - parading around with Emma in the form of her dead lover  but there was something else about it... about seeing the flirtatious pleading in those blue eyes as Emma looked up at her that Mystique liked.  

 _I don't know ,_ she thought at Emma, unfolding the wallet. The "I.D.s" inside there were nothing more than squares of cardboard cut from one of Angel's cigarette boxes  Emma would make them look like whatever they needed to look like to whoever was looking at them  but the bills were real.

 _The two bills on the top,_ Emma answered back. _If she tries to haggle, give her one more of the same, but don't go higher than that._

But the old woman did not try to haggle. She took the bills, then picked up one of the necklaces  Mystique thought that it was the nicest one, adored with a tear-drop shaped piece of amber which had no visible imperfections  and placed it in Mystique's hand.

Emma turned her head to the side, lifting up her hair with one delicate hand, baring the back of her slim, milk-white neck, and Mystique had bent slightly to fasten the change around her neck, brushing back some stray strands of hair to keep them from becoming caught in the clasp. The hands Mystique was wearing were bigger than she was used to, but they did not feel awkward to her. In the coming years she would hold the form of many people she found despicable  people she would come to hate even more than she hated Shaw now, such as Robert Kelley  but as unhappy as she felt in their bodies she never felt as though she did not have complete control over these forms.  

She was struck again by how much she _liked_ this, her hands brushing the back of that graceful neck, above the smooth and bare shoulders. As Mystique drew her hands away she was struck by the desire to run the side of her thumb along Emma's cheek, and did so, telling herself that it was all part of her act.

 _Runs in the family, does it?_ Emma's voice said lightly in her head, though she didn't know exactly what Emma meant by that she felt herself blushing tremendously.

It would be another two decades before she even heard the term "bisexual" and when she finally did she would embrace it for the explanatory force it carried, but by then she would not really need it; it would not be the same as the epiphany moment when Charles had first used the word "Mutant" to describe what they both were. By then she would have grown as comfortable with her sexuality has she had her natural blue skin, and indeed she would view it as another aspect of her mutation; she never felt as though she was completely herself when limited to being only one thing. But today this was an aspect of herself that she was barely aware existed, and now she only felt vaguely puzzled by herself.

" _Él es muy tímido_ ," the old woman had exclaimed to Emma when she saw Mystique's red face.

Still affecting a poor grasp of Spanish, Emma had paused, as though working out what the woman had said, and then she replied, " _Sí, él es inocente como una colegiala_."

They walked on, and soon they came to the bank - a columned monstrosity of white granite  and went inside, and the entire heist went so smoothly that Mystique wondered why she'd let herself get so worked up about it. She had simply gone to the teller and introduced herself as Sebastian Shaw, and when asked to produce I.D. she had handed over of of the squares of cardboard, the word "Marlboro" printed across its center  Angel did not smoke feminine cigarettes, she said that they had no flavor -  and Emma made the man see what she wanted him to see, and he turned over the key to the safety deposit box to Mystique. They'd gone to the vault, and once they'd been left alone Emma had opened Shaw's safety deposit box and dumped its glittering contents into her purse. And then they had gone outsider again, and it had all been as simple as that.

When they were on the street again, Mystique had turned to Emma and asked, "What now?"

"Now we meet Erik for lunch," she said, and looked up at Mystique, her teeth worrying at her lower lip. "You should change first." Abruptly, she dropped Mystique's arm and stepped to the side, putting space between them.

 _Did she love him?_ Mystique wondered suddenly, struck by the idea. The thought had not occurred to her before then; she had not, up until this afternoon, conceived of Emma as someone who might love; and even now the idea that anyone could have loved Shaw,  knowing  as Emma must have  what he had done seemed preposterous. Nonetheless, she wondered.

And on heels of that thought came, _How can she and Erik even look one another in the eyes?_

 _Leave it alone,_ Emma said, and the voice in her head was ice all over again. _Go change. Now._

Red-faced again, Mystique ducked down an alley. She looked around carefully before transforming. There was a piece of broken mirror hanging for a nail in the wall, and she glanced at herself, taking in the effect; hazel-nut skin and brown eyes deep enough to sink into, set in a round face with high cheekbones that were sharp enough to cut, and black hair that fell down past her waist. Looking like this, she imagined that she could have been taken for the old woman's granddaughter. She had felt as though she could fit in here like this, wrapped in a simulation of the same garments she'd seen the native women wearing.

When she came out again and Emma saw her, the other woman looked nearly apoplectic. _You speak Spanish now?_ she demanded silently. _You're completely fluent the dialect that they speak here? How about Araucano?_ Mystique did not even know what Araucano was  she guessed from context that it must be an Indian language. _What's the name of your tribe? Your family?_

As though to prove Emma's point, a handsome man with cheekbones to match the ones Mystique had copied passed her by, saying something that sounded casual and appreciative in a language that Mystique had never even heard before. She could only smile demurely and look away. The man went by, pausing briefly when he saw the way Emma was glaring at her, something hard coming into his eyes, but then he kept walking.

 _If you can't pass don't try,_ Emma said. _There's a reason we're supposed to look like tourists._

_I'm sorry  I didn't think -_

_I know you didn't,_ Emma projected back. But I keep hoping that you'll start at some point.

"I'll change again," Mystique said, returning to the alley, and when she came back again she was a brunette, plain and a bit chunky, no one anyone would look at twice.

 _Jesus Christ,_ Emma thought, and the voice in her head just sounded exhausted. _Why didn't you just transform yourself into a kicked puppy?_ Mystique didn't answer. She didn't trust herself to answer. "I'm trying to help you. I swear to God I am."

"I know you are," Mystique said, and she believed that; Emma was abrasive and mean and catty as hell, and there was something dark and wounded inside of her, but she was trying to teach Mystique the things she was going to need to know.  

"You could be something unstoppable," Emma said. "The potential is there, I can see it in you," and that had left Mystique feeling a little frightened of herself but also proud.

And then Emma lead her into the German district of the city  there were many tens of thousands of ethnic Germans in this country, Emma told her when Mystique wondered, some of their families had been here for two hundred years though many were more recent immigrants  and they went inside a small tavern and found Erik, already drunk and clutching a beer stein in white-knuckled hands, glaring at every man in the establishment with brooding suspicion, every muscle in his body tensed with the potentiality for violence, and Emma and Mystique had worked together carefully to coax him into leaving, and once he was out in the sunlight again he seemed somewhat better. And they had walked on together, killing time because Azazel wouldn't be picking them up until after dark, and Emma had snuggled up against Erik while they walked, and she had looked at them and hadn't been completely sure which of the two she was jealous of, and she had thought about Azazel and wondered what he was planning to show her when they got back to Chicago.  

And despite the rough patches and the mistakes she had made, despite her continuing disquiet about the jangling contents of Emma purse and despite Erik's black mood, she thought things were going pretty well. She'd been scared but she'd managed to do what had been asked of her, had shown that she could carry her own weight. She was thinking that she could really make things work with these two, as well as the rest of the Brotherhood, that she could map out the damaged terrain of their hearts and minds and learn to traverse it safely.

And while she was thinking about that, Erik and Emma were walking a step in front of her, and they went past the dusty shop window without even glancing in it, and Mystique had almost done the same, but something had caught her eye and she'd turned back quickly, taking in what stood in the shop's window with a sharp intake of breath. Erik and Emma had gone on for another ten steps, and then Emma had felt the red and broiling waves of shocked rage coming off Mystique, and had turned back toward her, pulling Erik along by the arm, and by the time they had joined her at the window something had broken inside Mystique that would never be right again.

There was a dead Mutant child in the window, mounted and stuffed like a trophy animal.


	11. Chapter 11

_"If you live among wolves you have to act like a wolf." - Nikita Khrushchev_

* * *

_Your eyes!_ Emma's voice hissed sharply inside her head, and Mystique caught a glance of herself in the dirty window glass; her eyes had gone yellow and were glowing like two golden coals. She blinked, and it was better  they were brown now, the way they were meant to be.

Nothing else was. Nothing else was the way it was supposed to be.

She looked through the window at the Mutant child, green and scaly and so very small, the embodiment of every nightmare that had haunted her own mind when she was a child, and she felt nothing but a dull and distant ache for something  anything  different for what their lives were.  

She turned back to Emma and Erik, and saw them share a look that was nothing but icy calculation. More seemed to pass between them in that brief instant than either could have projected, and Mystique did not believe that they had traded thoughts; she did not think that they had needed any words  spoken or otherwise  to reach a consensus on what to do next.

 _I'm among wolves,_ she thought again, as she had been Azazel had stared at her from the shadows of his bedroom a few nights previously, speculative murder in his eyes, but the thought no longer frightened her. She found it bracing. I can be a wolf, too, she thought, and took another step away from the girl that she had been.

Erik had gone into the store, and Emma and Mystique had followed after him. The owner had greeted them in English  _we're tourists,_ Mystique had thought distantly, trying to control her face, _we look like tourists_  and while Erik was making small talk with him Emma had said to her, _Go lock the door and close the blinds. He won't see you._ And Mystique had done so, letting near darkness into the already shadowy shop.

And there was very little, after all, that needed to be said about what happened next. To Mystique, the most remarkable thing about what followed next was how little she found that it all meant to her. A few months previously she would not have imagined how easy it could be to get used to seeing people being killed.

Emma had made herself known by shifting into her diamond form, and the man had drawn in a breath to cry out, but the air had caught in his throat an instant later when Emma had said quickly, "You can't scream," and he'd only produced a low panicked hissing.

Following Emma's lead automatically, Mystique had transformed as well, and the man's eyes had left Emma to lock on her. It was the first time she had revealed her natural form for the express purpose of frightening someone else, and she would have thought that doing so would make her feel something  powerful or repellent or _something_  but it did not.

"Do you want to know what he's thinking?" Emma had asked her, and her voice was as clinical and disengaged as Mystique felt. "He's looking at you, and he's thinking, 'Oh god oh god oh god, it's the monster's mother. It's the monster's mother and she's found me.'" She was watching the man with a highly focused gaze, and Mystique knew that she was doing more inside his mind than simply compelling his silence. There was no reason to hurt the man, no need to put him to the question; Emma could know everything he did and more without either of them breathing a word.

By then they had the man backed up against the front counter, and he had begun to cry  wet, panicked sobs that came with an eerie silence, since Emma had told his brain that his vocal chords did not work anymore  and Mystique had found that she simply didn't care. He meant absolutely nothing to her; his tears meant nothing, and everything he was or had been or might have become meant nothing. The dead child in the window meant something  certainly it did  but she found that she felt numb to that, too. She felt frightened by herself, but only in a distant and muffled way  it was not the sort of fear that would effect her ability to act.

"He's the one who did it?" Erik asked Emma.

"Of course."

"Did he know what he was doing?"

"Of course," Emma said again, and her upper lip had curled, revealing teeth that glittered like a line of cut gems. Later Mystique would wonder if that was completely true; she didn't think that Emma had lied to Erik  not exactly anyway  but Emma had a way of looking into people's minds and only seeing the worst parts. She was different from Charles in that; Charles always saw people as they saw themselves, and that so often blinded him to the reality, but Emma could miss things too. If the man had suspected  even in a dim, unacknowledged corner of his mind  that it wasn't some swamp monster or deformed animal that he'd killed and displayed in his window like a conversational piece  then Emma would conclude that the man had known exactly what he was doing. So, Mystique didn't think that Emma had lied, but it would not have worried her too much if she had.

There was a pause in which Mystique knew that Emma had projected something to Erik, and Erik had shrugged and said, "Fine," to Emma and "Go take her down from the window," to Mystique and he had stepped around the counter to go into the backroom and Mystique had walked to the front of the store to lift the child from out of the window, and when they had come back  Erik with a large cardboard box under one arm and Mystique with the child cradled in her arms like a hideously sad doll  there had been a body on the floor, and no one would ever call it murder, the coroner would declare that the cause of death had been a completely natural brain aneurysm, and the shopkeeper would be buried in the cemetery with all this friends and family around to mourn him, which was more than the child had gotten, and she and Erik had placed the poor little thing gently in the box, nested in among some old cleaning rags Erik had found, and then Emma had whistled for Azazel.

Azazel had appeared a few moments later. He had glanced impassively down at the body, asking no questions, but then he had lifted the flap of the box to peer inside. Then he recoiled, swearing loudly in Russian, and Mystique had believed then that some of the terrors that had haunted her childhood had been his as well. He looked up at Emma  he seemed to understand at once that the body had been her work  and had said, "You are getting soft. I would not have let him get away so easily."

"Let's just get the hell out of here," Emma said, and they had.


	12. Chapter 12

_Perhaps there is no greater love than that of a revolutionary couple, where each of the two lovers is ready to abandon the other at any moment should the revolution demand it. They do not love each other less than the amorous couple bent on suspending all their terrestrial links and obligations in order to burn out in a night of unconditional passion - if anything, they love each other more. - Slavoj Žižek_

* * *

Nearly four decades from now, when Mystique would rediscover the boy that she and Azazel would start tonight – the boy that she had been absolutely certain was dead – and she would have no desire to claim him as her own. She would find her boy ruined, the soft downy fur that had graced his skin plucked away in vain pursuit of a less inhuman appearance, the bare flesh marred by scars that he had carved into his own flesh, self-loathing masking itself as pious contrition for imagined sins. He was so passive – such an Uncle Tom, such a Quisling – that even Xavier's Mutants had difficulty mastering their disdain for him.

Her boy had grown into something that was only nominally like a man, someone so different from what the three of them had been together that he no longer even knew her. She would look at Kurt and think about everything else that she had lost along the way, all the dead and the gone, and she would freeze inside herself as she had when she saw the Mutant child in the window of that filthy little Argentinian shop.

It was something less like rage than despair, and she had no use for despair, as much as that emotion had wished to impose itself upon her life, and she looked for some way to push it away. She needed unfreezing – needed touch, contact, action – and she had needed to feel that she was powerful, that she had the power within herself and within her body to react and provoke reaction.

She had not gone to Erik. By then the things that bound them together had grown into something far too powerful to be expressed through casual sex. And in all honesty, he'd gotten too old to keep up with her.

No, instead Mystique had gone to the most dangerous man available, the only member of Xavier's sorry crew who was something close to her equal, the one who had marked her twice before; once at Liberty Island and once decades before then, back when his claws were only naked spurs of bone and his name was still Jim. She had not forgotten what he had done to the Brotherhood all those years ago, though he had forgotten all about them; had been _made to forget_ by the perpetrators of the Weapon X program, which was the only reason she'd come into his tent with an goal other than opening his throat and keeping it that way until his healing factor ran out of steam. Jim was dead, after all, murdered by his masters long ago; Logan wore the same body, but he was no more Jim than she was Shaw or Robert Kelley when she took on those likenesses. She was frustrated when he refused her, but she told herself that it didn't matter. Jim had been bad in bed – rough in a way that held no appeal for her, in a way that had been purely petty and selfish – but Logan was so mixed up about himself that he was probably even worse.

There was something predatory about the instinct that had drawn her to Logan, that always drew her to others, and by then she'd owned up to that and had accepted it as a part of herself. The dangerous ones attracted her when she felt the need to be dangerous herself and the wild ones drew her when she was feeling caged. She drew on their essence, as a hunter took power from the beast he had conquered. It was not all bad – she could give back a great deal, after all – but that was the truth of it. Now though, tonight with Azazel, she had not yet admitted it to herself; tonight she only had an idea that they might help each other get through this.

Azazel had taken them back to the Headquarters's common room, and Erik had set the box on the desk, amid all those bars of ugly gold. Then he had stepped away, and they had all stood, staring at the box but not touching it, not wanting to touch it, and Mystique had wondered distantly where Angel and Janos were, who would be stuck with the job of explaining to them what had happened. The four of them had stood there, not speaking, not doing anything, immobilized by the truth the contents of that box held, and the minutes had run on like hours. Emma had been the one to finally step forward. She had reached for the flaps of the box, and Mystique had seen a tremor in those delicate manicured fingers, and in the same instant Azazel had left with a loud crack and more smoke than was usual. And Mystique had turned and went from the room, too, damning herself for a selfish coward but feeling so icy and brittle that didn't think she could look at it again right now; she felt like another blow might break her into a thousand jagged pieces.

Mystique had gone upstairs, racing up the six flights of stairs for the sake of feeling as though she were going somewhere, and had arrived on her floor flushed and winded. She stood in the landing, panting a little, and had looked to right, the which lead to her own room, and then down the hall to the left, where Azazel's room was. She wondered – not for the first time – why, when there fifty empty rooms in this place to chose from, he'd taken up residence so close to her own door.

She went to the left, bare feet silent on the new carpeting, and had knocked softly on Azazel's door. There was no answer, but she felt almost certain that he was there; she turned the door knob and went inside.

The lights were off and the candles were unlit, but it was only dim inside the room, not dark. Azazel had pulled back the blinds, and the fading glow of the city's twilight came in through the window, casting soft shadows.

He was standing in the window, and that was reckless, that was dangerous, that put them all at risk, and she had gone over to stand in the window with him, looking along with him down at the city under their feet, and she had put a hand on his upper arm and had felt the tensed muscled under the stiff cloth of his jacket. Below them the city struggled on, the factory stacks billowed smoke and the cars and trucks and buses plodded along the roads, and people moved between the tightly packed red brick tenement houses which had stood their for a hundred years and which might stand for another hundred, despite all the corruption and rot within their rat-infested walls, and in the far distance she could see the stockyards, the clumps of black and brown dots that were a thousand head of cattle, placid in their ignorance to their fate.

She wrapped her arms around herself. “I'm starting to feel like I understand this city too well,” she said, just small-talk, just something fill the space where more treacherous words might have been tempted to take root. “This place sort of gets inside you. You know what I mean?”

“I do not understand it at all,” Azazel said thickly, and she knew that he was not speaking Chicago. “I could burn it all down and dance in the ashes,” he said, suddenly vicious. “I could. I could do this, and – and nothing of value would be lost!”

Mystique realized with sudden horror that he was precariously close to tears. The possibility that he was even capable of such a thing had not even occurred to her until that moment, and she did not believe she should handle it if it did happen, not on top of everything else. So she did the only thing she could think of to stop it – what she'd come here to do anyway – and put her arms around his neck to pull his mouth down to her level, and she kissed him.

Azazel's eyes had grown wide with sudden surprise, thought she hadn't seen this, and he had stiffened for an instant, which she did feel, and then he had had responded, his hands moving to her hips as he pressed back against her while her mouth worried at the scar that cut his upper lip.

After a minute Mystique had broken away, had taken him by the wrist and pulled him back toward the bed, and he had gone, shocked and delighted by the strength of her grip, by the forcefulness with which she pressed him down onto the bed. He paused on the edge of mattress to kick off his shoes before slipping back across the bed until his back was to the headboard and crossing his legs. She had slid onto the bed after him, kneeling across from him. Mystique leaned in and kissed him again, her mouth wandering this time away from his own, kisses trailing down his neck until she found herself thwarted by his high collar, and then her fingers had gone to work on the buttons of his jacket.

“You are _aggressive_ ,” he had breathed with a sort of wonderment, and his own hands had begun to undo the buttons from the opposite side of the line, and Mystique had been thrilled to see that his own hands were not entirely steady, that his fingers rushed and fumbled and tore one of the buttons from his jacket. She had known that he was interested but she had not realized that he wanted her so badly, and the knowledge that he did want her – that he wanted her as she was, as all that she was – spurred her own, and when the last button had been unbuttoned she helped him shrug his way out of the jacket. She flung it off the side of the bed then reached under his silk shirt, peeling it away from his skin, and when that was gone too she had paused briefly, leaning back to admire what she had found. His bare arms were sinewy, the well-defined muscle hard and unyielding, and she had run her hands up and down the length of those arms once then twice then again – feeling, touching, taking in – and then she had moved to his broad chest and had done the same, fingertips playing in the swirls of thick black hair.

“Lay back,” she said, and shifted herself to the side to give him room to slide down onto his back before moving to straddle his hips, and grinned as she leaned over him, because they had barely even started and he was hard already, she could feel him pressing against her through the fabric of his pants. She'd leaned in closer, rubbing the palms of her hands hard against his chest, astonished when the color did not wear away under pressure, because though she had known intellectually that it would not she had not quite believed. Even as well as she knew her own blue skin, it was hard to imagine that someone could truly be so vibrant a color – such an aggressive brilliant red – and she had wanted to touch that skin since the moment she had first seen it, to prove to herself that it was not paint or dye but only him, the truth of him. His nipples were carmine red, darker than the rest of him, and when she'd run her hands over them he'd drawn in a sharp intake of breath and squirmed under her touch.

Azazel's hands had come up to cup her face, drawing her mouth down to meet his own, and then his hands had traveled on, broad fingertips exploring the scaling and ridges along her face and neck and shoulders. Those hands were huge and heavy, rough with hard callouses, and they had moved over her flesh with a care that was almost awkward. He was not – as she might have imagined before she'd known him better – incapable of gentleness, but he was unschooled in it, and that made him tentative.

His hands had hesitated, lost along the arch of her collarbone before moving recklessly onto her breasts, and that hesitation, coupled with the hunger that was in his touch and his eyes confirmed what she had only suspected before; he talked a good game, but he'd come into this bed with much less experience than she had, quite possibly none.

So she'd let out a moan – not faking, she would never want or need to fake it with him – but letting herself _go_ in a way she had never dared to do with the human boys who would have been frightened or disgusted had she lost control of her disguise, had just let her body run _free_. And that had encouraged him – good lord, had it ever – and then his mouth had been on her breasts, lips tracing the swirls on her skin, mapping the typography of smooth and rough, and when she cried out again there had not been the slightest calculation to it.

And while he was doing that, making himself crazy and her crazier, her hand had traveled downward and found that hardness, bulging inside the confines of his pants. And she'd brushed her fingers against it through the cloth, almost tickling while she gauged the size of it, then he had been the one to groan, low and so deep that she had felt his chest vibrate, and his teeth had grazed the skin of her breasts, and that had been the limit of her control.

Mystique had pulled down his fly, pushed the boxer shorts down out of her way, and had drawn him out. And at the same time, she herself had changed subtly below, opening herself to him, making a space within herself to accommodate him.

She'd leaned back to look at him, pressing him back gently against the mattress with one hand on his chest when he had tried to follow her breasts upwards, and found everything she'd hoped for and then some extra. His cock was as red as the rest of him, thick and heavy and very warm in her hand. It was stiff and hard and ready to go in a way that she took as a heartfelt complement. She had waggled forward along his hips, ready to go too, ready to feel him inside her, but she'd felt that hesitation again, had seen something like fear pass across his face.

“You won't hurt me,” she said.

It had been meant as reassurance, but Azazel took it as a question. “No,” he said, in the tones of a man taking a holy vow. “I will never hurt you.”

And then they had slipped together, and for a time she had been lost and completely content to be lost, lost in the rhythm and motion of their bodies, lost too in his eyes, because she had never done this in the light before, before she had always had to turn the lights off first in case she'd slipped up and lost control of herself. She'd always had to remember that she was in hiding, had never been able to discard the fear of being found out to bask in the sensation, and this now was something so different – _so good_ – to see him and be seen, this was how it was supposed to be, this was real when her entire past had been false. And she had crested quickly and broke and had begun to rise again, spurred by the pace of his breathing and the short, inarticulate cries he made between muttered words of Russian, all of which she could somehow still hear over herself, and then his voice had risen to match hers, his notes rough while hers had been high.

And it had been over before she would have liked, but that was okay, that was easy to forgive because looking down at him now – eyes closed, panting with the silliest and most self-indulgent goddamned _grin_ plastered across his face - she knew he'd be ready to go again soon.

After a minute his eyes had opened, and he'd looked up at her with such adoration that she could barely believe it. _Got your cherry_ , she thought tenderly, suspecting already that really that she'd gotten more of him than that, maybe more that she'd counted on.

She'd rolled off him and on to her side, and he'd turned to his side too, to face her. His tail had come out from where it had been trapped beneath him, and the flat of its tip had moved to stroke her leg. She'd caught his in her hands, playing with it as it twitched in her hand, but carefully, because the the tip was sharp enough to cut. When she looked back up at him she found his eyes were still fixed on her with a short of intensity that reminded her of why she'd first been so frightened of him. “You are poetry,” he said. “You and I were made for each other.”

And she believed that. Even though all the bad that was coming, she would never stop believing that.

Before long they had begun again, Azazel on top this time. He was a solid and reassuring weight, that if not enough to make the world less dangerous, at least left her feeling better equipped to handle that danger.

And so it had gone, into the night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So today I was supposed to read and summarize 200 pages of Marx for school, as it's due on Tuesday.
> 
> Instead I wrote porn. You're welcome.


	13. Chapter 13

_Our lives are fucked up. This isn’t random, individual, or isolated. It’s the lived experience of hetero-patriarchy, white supremacy, gender rigidism, capitalism, rape culture, prison society, hierarchy, ecological degradation, and on and on. We can’t escape this world. We can’t wait for its internal contradictions to collapse it deterministically. We have to destroy it (position of attack, permanent of conflictuality).  
However, going up against these systems is scary. We need to support each other in fighting through the fear, anxiety, depression, trauma, despair, etc. That means pushing each other, which means organizing our relationships of support towards attack. Support, radical support anyway, means more than treating symptoms, it mean going after the root causes, so support means attack. - from “SAFE(R) SPACE MEANS ATTACK,” by “Dave and Maria.”_

* * *

Erik had not gone to bed that night.

Emma had taken the body out, and then she had pushed the box backwards over the edge of the desk with the back of her wrist, thrusting it away as though it were something filthy. It had fallen out of sight, the papers inside it rustling, and by then he and Emma had been alone in the room.

“Cowards,” said Emma – who would pretend invulnerability even when any fool could see that her hands were shaking – as Raven had retreated from the room and down the hall in the wake of Azazel's dissipating cloud of smoke. Raven had not heard her; Erik was sure of that, because had Raven heard she doubtlessly would have turned around to come back.

It was better that she had not. He had seen this type of poison in Emma before, and he did not believe that Raven understood how it needed to be handled. Emma's capacity for hate was almost boundless, and there were times when she lost control of it completely, when the spite and bitterness crossed the careful demarcation line between acceptable targets and allies to lash out at anyone convenient. Raven would have been solicitous, she would have wanted to pacify Emma's anger or to at least understand it, and all that would have been utterly useless. There was nothing for these rages except to weather them.

 _It's different for them,_ he might have said, had he thought it would make the slightest bit of difference. _We can't understand the fear of being exposed on the same level as they do._ That was only an explanation for why Raven and Azazel had reacted the way they had, but to Emma it would have sounded like pity, and even at the best of times Emma could not abide pity.

So instead he'd chosen to ignore her, which (he reflected ruefully) was always the best choice with Emma, anyway. Erik had sunk heavily onto the couch, his hands dangling palms-down over the edges of his splayed legs. He was drunk still, more drunk then he ever should have allowed himself to become, and he was worn out. The dreams had gotten very bad as of late, and he had not been sleeping well.

 _How can I be so tired?_ he wondered. _We haven't even done anything yet, so how is it that I'm so tried?_ They had accomplished next to nothing so far; a few isolated incidents of retaliatory violence, nothing meaningful on a broad scale, nothing that would really change anything in the long term. He was not as certain of the way forward as he had been on that Cuban beach, and some of the others – Raven, most of all – were looking to to lead the way, while some of the others – Emma, constantly Emma, always Emma – were pushing him toward directions he was not at all certain he wanted to go.

His failure to respond had not gone unnoticed. Emma glanced back at him, unwrangled spite in her blue eyes, and then she'd turned back away to sit the body, mounted upright on its wooden base, between two of the stacks of gold bars. The effect had been obscene, as Erik had no doubt she'd intended it to be. She was trying to hurt him now, but more than that she was trying to heart hurt herself. He had seen her do it before; daring herself to be utterly heartless, trying to distance herself so far from anything that was so unironically called _human_ decency that she would be untouchable, impervious to the sort of impotent rage and pain matters like this provoked.

 _It doesn't help nearly as much as it should to kill them, does it?_ he might have asked her, had her mood been more trustworthy, but instead he had pushed the thought down, keeping it soft so she wouldn't hear it. Charles would have picked up on it anyway, but then Emma was no Charles.

Emma had stepped away from the body, then they had both simply looked at it in silence for what seemed like a very long time.

He had been thinking of it as a body, but he realized after a while that wasn't really what it was – not exactly. His knowledge of taxidermy was limited, but from what he understood the effect was realized by mounting a tanned skin around an artificial frame of foam or wood that had been cut to the proper dimensions. So after all it was not really a body, and all the thoughts and questions that realization provoked did not bear further consideration. Looking closely now, he could see the stitching, even seams running down the center of the chest and belly and along the insides of the limbs. Frankenstein's monster, he had thought disjointedly, and the swastikas stamped into the gold bars had sparkled in a way that forced him to consider the possibly that he was losing his mind.

Quite unbidden, his thoughts had turned to some of the stories he'd heard, the ones about the lampshades made of human skin.

“A myth,” Emma said dismissively.

“Most likely,” Erik had allowed. “But it's rather hard to underestimate human depravity, wouldn't you agree?”

“I don't care to speculate,” she said. “Whether it's true or not makes no difference to me.”

He supposed later that he probably should have left things there – they had hashed this out a dozen times already and the results had never been productive – but he had not. “No?” he'd asked, and he'd put enough menace in his voice and thoughts to let her know that it was past time for her to back down.

She ignored this. “No. We've not stake in their intraspecies conflicts, Erik,” and by that he understood her to mean the entire scoop of human history, and that what had been done to his mother was included in the wide sweep of her dismissal, though she had never said that much explicitly – there were one or two lines that even Emma knew better to cross, even when she was on these destructive tangents.

“Mutants should have no allegiances to anything human,” she said, her voice moving with a steady and rehearsed rhythm while she worked so hard to make matters that were of the greatest complexity _appear_ to be simple. “All the nonsense that I can hear you agonizing over every time you read the papers or watch the news – the Negro movements, the homophiles, the situations in Israel or Germany or Ireland or Vietnam – mean nothing to us. The murders and genocides and wars mean nothing to us. Why should we care if they want to destroy their own kind? It just means there will be less of them for us to have to deal with in the end.”

“Are you done yet?” he asked, trying not only to _sound_ bored and indifferent but to also to _feel_ that way. He had an idea that if he wasn't careful he might end up hitting her, and if that happened things might spiral out of control completely. Anything might happen then.

When he had decided to recruit Emma he had done so with the understanding that she was, in some fundamental and probably irreparable way, crazy. He believed that Shaw was at least partially responsible for this, and though it had since become clear that the tactics Shaw had employed to break and dominate her were far more subtle than those he had used against Erik, Erik had not reversed his opinion, at least not completely, though he had recognized that part of the problem had a great deal to do with Emma herself. Again he found himself comparing her to Charles; Charles was people the way they wanted to see themselves – he saw the best in people, and even when the amount of good inside someone was minute, he believed that it represented who the person _really_ was. Emma was the exact opposite; she saw the worst – she saw what people were afraid that they might be rather than what they were – and took that as the whole person. Another interesting comparison; whereas Charles could not shield his mind the way Emma could, he seemed capable of choosing not to read the thoughts of others (however poor his self-discipline might have been in this regard), but Emma heard _everything_ , regardless of whether she wanted to or not.

So he understood that she was not especially well put-together – _well, but none of us are_ – but there were two additional things he understood about what Emma was saying. The first was that she was speaking with the voice of Shaw. The second was that it was complete and utter bullshit, and that Emma probably knew that, but was trying very hard to convince them both otherwise.

“You know I'm right,” she said. “You just won't admit it yet because of _him_.”

He had thought for a minute, deciding how he wanted to handle this. Pity would hurt her the most, he concluded, and so he said, “My dear, I'm beginning to believe that you're more fucked up than I am. That's _appalling_.”

“Go to hell,” she snarled at him, the detached coldness with which she had spoken either suddenly replaced by raw and red rage. Her face, he noticed, could be quite ugly when she was angry like this.

“I've already been,” he said, and was surprised by the lightness of his own voice. “I believe you will remember that very recently I thanked your old boyfriend for being such a fine host during my visit there.” That had been a stupid thing to say, of course, because it only escalated things into previously unmapped territories of ugly, but he found also that he did not care very much.

“I could send you back,” she hissed, and Erik was not especially impressed to find that she had begun to cry. “I could make you think that you were there _forever_. I could do absolutely anything – you do not know what I am capable of. I could cause every person in this house drop dead within a heartbeat.”

“You could,” he agreed. “But that would all be terribly lonely, wouldn't it?”

She'd left him alone after that, and he'd set on the couch and looked at what was on the desk, wondering if he'd played his cards right. He did not really believe that she would turn against them – what capacity for rebellion she had was purely passive – but it would only take one reckless moment for her to do something that she wouldn't be able to take back later. He was not so worried about playing with fire himself, but the idea that the others might pay for his failure to do things correctly frightened him a great deal. He'd lost at that game twice already – once in Poland and once in Cuba - and he had no desire to do so ever again.

And so he'd set and looked at the body that was really just a obscenely tailored skin and wondered what they could possibly do with it, and he'd looked at that stolen gold and wondered the same about that, and he'd wanted very badly to get rid of both, but thought instead that he should go get his helmet and the 5 Reichsmark coin and line them up beside the body and the gold, and perhaps once he had done that he might be able to make sense of all of this, might be able to see what the past meant and what the future must be, but he'd left the coin inside the ruined remains of the submarine, back when he'd almost believed that if he killed Shaw he might be able to leave it all behind and start over again. Now he wished that he had not left the coin behind, because it had after all been something of a perverse comfort to him, a clarifying object and the only relic of his aborted childhood, and he found that he missed the sensation of feeling it orbit his fingers while he was working out what his next step should be.

Erik thought that he ought to have been thinking about what he needed to do next for the Brotherhood, but instead his mind had turned to his uncle Kurt, his only living relative and the man who had taken him into his small Belfast flat after the liberation. Erik remembered meeting the old man on the docks after he'd arrived in Ireland. He and Kurt had never met before, and Erik didn't think he would have been able to find him among the crowd if it hadn't known that Kurt had lost his left arm in the first war, a fact had not actually narrowed his search field that appreciatively – the world was full of men with missing limbs, after all. But they had found each other eventually and then Kurt had embraced him a one-armed hug so fierce that Erik had been afraid his ribs would break. The touch had frightened him, and though he had not reacted to that fear visibly it had caused him quite unintentionally to make the gears in Kurt's watch bend and springs snap.

It would be several hours before Kurt noticed that his watch was broken, and a few days more before he connected the way the doorknobs in his flat had begun to take themselves apart in the night to his nephew's bad dreams. The old man had not turned him out then, nor when he'd caught Erik in a state of near-undress with Jimmy Quinn from the Catholic school down the street a year later (though that had in truth jarred Kurt more seriously than the metal-bending) and these were only two of the many things that Erik was deeply and sincerely grateful to him for.

It had been months since he'd spoken to his uncle, Eric realized with a sudden bolt of of shame, and so he'd gotten up and gone to the phone and had dialed the number from memory. A wary voice on the other end of the line had said, “Hello?” and Erik had said, “Onkel Kurt.”

“Erik!” the old man had said, and there was such relief and joy in his voice that Erik had thought that he might just curl up and die of guilt. “I've been so worry. You haven't called me.”

“I know, Uncle,” Erik said, slipping back into the Yiddish-dotted German that his uncle was using. “I'm sorry. I've just... I've been busy.” That was an absurd understatement and a poor excuse to give to an old man who had loved him so well, but Erik could think of nothing better to say.

The silence had not gone on for long. “Where are you, Erik? Last time it was Switzerland, wasn't it?”

“Yes, Switzerland,” Erik agreed. “Only for a couple of weeks, though. I'm in America now.”

“America?” Kurt repeated. “You do like to wander, don't you?”

“I've been told we're given to wandering,” Erik agreed, and was gratified to hear the old man laugh. “It was Argentina before then. I've been there twice now, actually.”

“The climate in Argentina is very good, isn't it?”

“Everyone I meet says that,” Erik agreed, and changed the subject. “Oh, and I've been to Cuba as well, though I didn't stay for long. I never formed an opinion about the Cubans themselves, but the tourists there are terribly ungrateful and rude. You do them a favor and they slap you right in the face.”

“Russians?” his uncle asked.

“Russians and Americans,” Erik said.

“Oh? I heard the Americans had set up a travel embargo to Cuba.”

“Well, they came anyway,” Erik said, and shifted gears again, because he had not meant to tell lies to the old man. “Uncle, how are you?”

“My arm hurts,” he said. “The doctor thinks I'm making it up. He thinks I'm just an old kvetcher, complaining about things that aren't even there anymore.”

“I believe you,” Erik said. “I don't doubt you at all. After all, it's the things that are gone that hurt the most, isn't that true?”

Kurt had not answered right away, and he did not answer directly. “How are you, Erik?”

“I'm perfectly fine,” Erik said, chagrined to find that he was lying again.

“You're not in trouble, are you?”

“In trouble? I _am_ trouble, you know that,” Erik said, but this time his uncle had not laughed. “I don't know what you mean,” he said finally, which was but also wasn't another lie, because he wasn't at all sure what the old man was driving at.

“Someone's been opening my mail,” he said, seemingly apropos of nothing, and it took Erik a moment to understand that the question his uncle had asked him had really been, _Have you done something that's apt to get me into trouble?_ and that was another question that Erik realized suddenly he might not be able to answer without lying. “And I think my flat is being watched. It's a different man for every day of the week. I think they're Americans but I'm not sure. They could be G2 men, but they seem out of place, you know?”

“I'll come get you,” Erik said quickly. “I can be there in an hour. No – I'll be there sooner. I'll be there in five minutes.”

“Five minutes,” his uncle repeated. “From America.” There was a short pause, and then he said, “You've found others, haven't you? Other people who are like you.”

“Yes.”

“Didn't I tell you? I always said that you couldn't be the only one.”

“I want to come get you.”

“No. This is my home and no one is going to scare me away,” he said, and now there was a stubbornness in his voice. It was the stubbornness that had led Kurt to marry the Catholic field nurse he'd fallen in love with he was recovering from his wound, though both their families had disowned them for it. Erik knew something about that sort of stubbornness, and he did not believe that he could win against it. He tried, though.

“But that's no way think,” he said. “You know how stupid that is, I don't need to tell you. I'm going to come get you.”

“No, no, you don't need to do that,” Kurt said, trying to defuse the deadly seriousness that had gone into Erik's voice. “I'm just a silly old man, I've probably imagined the entire thing,” and Erik wondered, _Who's the liar now?_ but the thought was absolutely no comfort to him. “I've got an appointment, I need to go now. You'll call me again soon, won't you?”

 _Not from this phone,_ Erik thought, but all he said was, “Of course. I'll call again soon,” and he was relived when Kurt did not asking him for his own number, though later he would realize that his uncle must have known that Erik couldn't give it to him, not if there was any chance that he was being watched.

“Stay safe,” his uncle said. “Look after yourself.”

“Of course.” Then he added quickly, “One more thing, uncle.”

“Yes?” Kurt asked.

“I got him. You know the one I mean. I finally got him.”

“Good,” Kurt had said, and then the line had gone dead.

And Erik had gone back to the couch to look at the things on the desk again, but he was thinking clearly now. He was seeing the errors that he had made thus far and what he would need to do to correct them, and that was good. As worrying as some of the things Kurt had told him was, it was good to have perspective again. He had allowed the situation to degrade too far, but tomorrow he would correct that.

He'd set and thought long and hard about what he needed to do, and sometime near dawn Emma had come back, and it had been like speaking to a different person, because she had been repentant and scared and painfully eager to win his forgiveness. She'd crouched in front of him and had taken one of his hands between both of her own and had said, “I can fix it. The camp. Shaw. What happened to your mother. Charles. I can fix it. I can make you forget it all.”

Emma stammered to a halt when her words provoked a sudden panic in him that even her earlier threats had not. She strained her mind, trying to figure out what it was he wanted of her, but he was so damned hard to read – he hid so much and was so good at hiding it, sometimes she didn't think even _he_ knew his own mind. “Or,” she said quickly, “I can make it so you still remember it, but so it doesn't hurt so much. Is that what you want? Should I do that?”

“Emma – _no_ ,” he said, but he drew her up on the couch beside him and when she tried to curl in close to him he allowed her to do so, and put his arm around her shoulders. It cost him nothing to do so, after all, and she needed to be held very badly.

“I'm sorry too,” he told her, knowing as his said it that she could not really change, that she would not stop fighting him over his human ties, that she would not give up the destructive and self-defeating ideas that Shaw had planted in her head, and knowing too that this could not be allowed to continue. _Tomorrow, I take control of things whether she likes it or not,_ he thought. But what he said was, “Everything's going to be okay,” because after all, part of loving someone meant lying to protect him or her from the unavoidable truth for as long as possible.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1.) There's a great deal of contention over whether or not lampshades made of human skin were actually produced at the Buchenwald concentration camp or elsewhere. I've defer to the conclusions of Michael Shermer, who concluded that this was a myth. Shermer has made a long career of debunking holocaust deniers (among many other classes of fools and liars) so I'm operating under the assumption that he knows his shit. There may be evidence that I am not aware of, however I am doing my best not to make errors.
> 
> 2.) I borrowed the name “Jimmy Quinn” from my favorite novel, The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. You should all go read it.  
> 3.) Yeah, there's an OC in this chapter, sorry. He's going to be important to the story, so I guess folks will have to deal? Further clarification as to who this Kurt character is can be found in my short story, “Just Like Him.”
> 
> 4.) For additional clarification as to the “canonality” of the XM: FC stories I've written so far, as they relate to DEVIL; “Just Like Him” is canon to the DEVIL-verse, as is “After The End” and “Faker.” “No Picnic” exists on a different timeline from DEVIL, and “The Nuns Loved Him” is just complete silly crack that has nothing to do with any of my other stories.


	14. Chapter 14

_There are moments in one's life which are like frontier posts marking the completion of a period but at the same time clearly indicating a new direction. - Karl Marx_

_Qui si convien lasciare ogni sospetto  
Ogni vilta convien che qui sia morta  
(Here you must abandon all hesitation  
Here all fear must die)  
\- Dante  _

* * *

The weakness  it that had even been what it was  that Mystique had seen in Azazel the night before, when she found him standing exposed in the open window, looking lost and helpless angry, would rarely resurface. It was not characteristic of him, and later that afternoon  once Erik had intervened on the current situation within the Brotherhood and had set them on a course that they all (or at least, everyone but Emma) believed would be fruitful  she would decide that what she'd seen in Azazel had been symptomatic of what they were all feeling. They had been passive for too many weeks, inactive and without direction, and that had bred feelings of impotence within them all.

The night had driven much of the ugliness of the day before away from her, yet as the sun began to leak in under the window blinds the coldness she'd felt overtake her outside that Argentinian shop began to creep back in on her. The tenor of their future had been set yesterday, in a way that even Cuba had not, and that was hard. That was very hard. The bad times that Erik had predicted had begun already, if not in earnest  the child had proven that, and there had been nothing for it but to respond in kind  and she was no longer frightened at the prospect of becoming a killer, because she had seen that that much at least would be surprisingly easy, but the coldness worried her. She had a sense that she might lose herself to it entirely if she was not very careful.

Azazel was asleep beside her, his breathing deep and steady, and she had considered reaching out wake him with her touch. She had little doubt that she could get him going again without any effort, and that would have been good; he was all fire, and that was good, that was what she felt she needed to push the frost back.

But then she remembered for the first time how they had left Emma and Erik alone down there in the common room, alone with the body and with the job of explaining to Janos and Angel what had happened, and then she had felt deeply ashamed. _I shouldn't have abandoned them like that,_ she thought, feeling already an uneasy pulling between her loyalties, and she'd begun to get up. She would go back to her own room and shower, then she would go downstairs, apologize to the others for flaking out, and then -

Azazel's hand had caught her lightly around the wrist. That startled her  maybe more than it should have, if she was completely honest, maybe more than it would have if it had been any of the silly and harmless boys she'd been with before  and she tensed, a small gasp escaping her lips. The hand fell away as though her skin was burning hot, and she had become instantly aware that she had screwed up very badly.

She drew her legs back into the bed and shifted herself so she was looking down at him. His face had become quite impassive, the sort of expression that hid something else too raw to be shown. _He thinks I'm afraid of him,_ she thought. _Well, but I am._

Then she thought, almost fiercely, as though it was a sort of dare, _But not a whole lot. Maybe not even as much as I should be._

There was still so much between them that had not been addressed, that might be unaddressable. His stance on Shaw and Shaw's plans and all the rotten history that came with Shaw had yet to be explained to her satisfaction, despite Azazel's protestations. Reconciling what she'd seen during the night raid on the CIA compound with what she'd learned of him since had become no less difficult. Mystique's conception of what Azazel was and was not capable of remained murky, and less clear was her understanding of why he did so many of the things he did. So she supposed she was a little scared. That was okay, on the balance, because it wasn't anything she didn't know how to deal with.

_I've been scared my entire life,_ she thought. _It might be a nice change to be scared on my own terms._

But she had not meant to wound Azazel with her fear, so she'd snuggled up against his arm and had said lightly, "You startled me. I thought you were asleep."

He had not answered, but the mask had dropped from his face like a heavy weight, and now there was too much of _everything_ on his face, all mixed in with a look that seemed more like adoration than love. Azazel did not do things by half-measures, Mystique understood that much already. Often he would stand on the sidelines, but when he decided to throw in with something he did it completely, without pausing for hesitation or self-doubt. That was worrying, in a way. She had an idea that he might have fallen for her just about as hard as someone could fall.

"We need to go downstairs..." she began, but did not quite know how to go on without seeming to criticize him for fleeing the common room the night, which had no desire whatsoever to do; she understood perfectly well why he had run, after all.

"I can think of better thing to do," he said, and she snorted at that. "You are wicked," he said told her, smiling with the left side of his mouth, and she felt relieved to see that the other thing had been put behind them so easily.

Azazel sat up in the bed beside her, the sheets piling around his naked waist. His hair was badly disheveled, and Azazel seemed aware of this, as he ran his fingers through it several times, pulling it back into some semblance of order, before speaking again. "Yesterday I have promised to take you somewhere today," he said.

It had really been two days ago, but she did not see the need to correct him. She would learn  quickly that his ability to keep track of times and dates was atrocious. "I know," she agreed. "But we can't do that right now."

"You make me a liar," he said, and there was something petulant and offended in his voice. Mystique had an idea that this had to do with something more than the trip to wherever it was he meant to go. She suspected that he was trying to put off facing the others this morning, probably Emma especially. Looking back on this moment some time later, once she had learned how very good he was at avoiding things he didn't want to do, she would become quite certain that her hunch was right.

"No," she said, as she stood up. "We can go later, if you still want to. I want to go. But right now I have responsibilities that I need to take care of. You understand what I mean?"

He'd nodded, but his face was again unreadable.

Mystique had gone to the door, but had turned back with her hand on the knob. "You're coming down too, right?"

"I will come," he said, but did not move to get up.

Mystique had gone back to her own room to get straightened up, and then she'd gone downstairs to the common room. She'd found it empty, which surprised her; Erik was an earlier riser, and she could not remember ever having beaten him downstairs in the morning. She'd gone to the kitchen, but there was no one there either, so she'd made herself a quick breakfast and had gone back to the common room to wait for Azazel and the others.

She jumped when the phone on the desk began to ring. It had never done that before  in truth she hadn't even known that it worked  and she had looked around wildly for someone to tell her what to do about it. It kept ringing and no one came to answer it, so after a long moment's hesitation she went over to it, staring down at it like it was a potentially dangerous snake. And finally she picked it up, bringing the receiver silently to her ear.

"Erik?" a worried voice on the other end of the line hand said, and then she had panicked completely.

"Charles," she answered back with Erik's voice.

"Thank God," she heard Charles say, "I'm so relieved to have reached you. Listen very carefully, my friend. I believe that you all may be in danger."

"Tell me," Mystique said, because her instincts told her that was what Erik would have said.  

"I'm afraid that the psychic blocks I placed in the minds of the agents we were involved with are being to degrade. I believe that very soon they'll remember enough about us  our names and faces, to begin with  to be able to cause us some difficulty. I've hidden the mansion. Is Emma capable of doing the same for your location?"  

"I've no idea," she said. "But I'll make certain to find out."

There was a long pause, and that worried Mystique, because she felt that Erik would have taken command of such an awkward silence. Finally, Charles asked, "Is my sister well?"

She felt her heart begin to beat very quickly. "She's perfectly fine, Charles, though I'm not sure that's any of your business at this point. I'd be more interested in knowing how you got this number."

It was a stupid thing to ask, and she knew that at once; there could only be one answer. There was another pause, and then Charles said, "The number? Erik, you gave it to me..."

"Of course," she snapped, trying to think of something that would divert him, because he could be thick when he couldn't read the other person's mind but he was by no means stupid, and when he worked this out it was all going to be too embarrassing to stomach. "And that's why -"

But before she could finish whatever nonsense she had meant to say, Charles had said, " _Raven_?" and his voice bogged down in some unidentifiable emotion. "Raven, I'm so -" but she did not hear what he was so  so happy hear from her, so sorry for messing up, so hurt that she had lied to him? - because she had taken the phone from her ear and had placed it back in its cradle.

And a few minutes later Erik had come into the room. "When was the last time you saw Angel and Janos?" he demanded.

"I don't know... I think the afternoon before Argentinian?" She thought for a moment, then added, "Yeah, I saw Angel then. I don't know about Janos. Why?"

"Goddammit," Erik had muttered, his tone harried, and he'd begun to leave without answering.

"Erik, wait  I need to tell you something," she said, and when he'd turned back she'd told him  about the phone call, leaving nothing out.

Erik listened closely, but when she was finished he didn't seem that concerned by any of it. "Old news. He didn't tell you anything I hadn't already figured out."

"It's serious, though, I think -"

"No doubt of that, and we're going to discuss that at our meeting tonight, among other things." _Meeting?_ Mystique wondered. _What meeting, since when do we have meetings?_ "But right now I need to figure out -"

And then Emma had stepped into the room behind him, and Erik had turned at the sound of her footsteps. "Well?"

"No note," she said. "But their clothes and most of their stuff is gone. I told you -"

Erik didn't let her finish. "Do you know where Azazel is?" he asked Mystique sharply.

"Yeah, I -" she began. "I mean, he's... he's in his room. I guess."

" _Jesus Christ,_ " Emma had said, but neither of them paid much attention to her.

"What the hell's going on?" Mystique demanded.

"Nothing that can't be worked out," Erik said, but Emma said, "Your little friend deserted us in the night and she took Janos with her. Erik, I told you that you needed to -"

"I was there when you told me the first time, Emma, so I assure you that I do know what it was that you told me," Erik said to her. To Mystique he said, "Please go get Azazel. I need his help."

"I am here," Azazel had called from the hallway. A moment later he rounded the corner to join them in the common room. His hair was still wet from the shower, and he ran his fingers through it unselfconsciously, pulling it back out of his eyes.

"Wonderful," Erik said. "Listen  can you tell me where Angel and Janos are?"

Azazel had cocked his head slightly, and his gaze had seemed to turn inward. "Not here," he said after a moment, frowning.

"We already knew that," Emma snapped. " _I_ could tell that much."

Azazel frown had deepened at Emma's words, and there was not a small bit of anger in it now. But he had tried again, using whatever inner sense his ability had given him to seek the pair out and pinpoint their location. "Hotel," Azazel said, speaking pointedly to Erik now and Erik alone. "In Cleveland."

"Wonderful," Erik said again. "Now, I need you and Emma to go bring them back here. Just to talk, understand? Don't force them, but bring them back so that we can all work this out together."

"I will go," Azazel told him. "But I think that I would rather go alone."

"I can go with him," Mystique volunteered quickly. "Angel will listen to me if I ask her to come back."

"It's better if Emma goes," Erik had said, and there was something in his tone that told her to drop it. Azazel, too, seemed to catch on to that. He shrugged easily, in a way that seemed to say, _Well, you're the boss,_ and reached his hand out to Emma.

Emma had taken it, but she looked at Erik with narrowed eyes. "What is it that you're planning, Erik?" she'd asked suspiciously, but they were gone before Erik had time to answer.

"Azazel has an admirable sense of timing, doesn't he?" Erik asked drly.

"What _are_ you planning?" Mystique asked. He looked exhausted, she realized suddenly, like he hadn't slept in days. There were dark circles under his eyes, but his eyes themselves were bright, sparkling with a life and energy she hadn't seen there in she didn't know how long.  

"It's very simple, my dear," Erik told her. "Things have not been going the way they should have here  do not try to argue, you know it as well as I do. We have been rudderless. We have taken almost no action, and when we have acted those actions have very frequently been incorrect. I take total responsibility for this.

"But all that will end today," he promised her. "Today I will seize power. But for this to work, I will need you by my side."

"You've got me," Mystique said, making a vow that would last for the rest of their lives, even when all else had gone to ash. "I'm yours."

And so Erik had told her what it was that they were going to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1.) I'm really, really, REALLY supposed to be doing homework, you guys. For real.
> 
> 2.) BUT I REGRET NOTHING.
> 
> 3.) Actually, that's not true. I regret the title of this story a lil bit. I chose it back when I thought this was going to be a short five chapter story about how Mystique and Azazel got together. Obviously, it's become something much bigger than that. I'm not going to re-title it now, because I don't want to confuse/annoy anyone, but I think if I knew then what I know now I would have called it Falling.
> 
> 4.) Erik has decided that he wants to talk like Vladimir Lenin, IDK why either.


	15. Chapter 15

_"Compassion sometimes hurts. When you feel connected to everything, you also feel responsible for everything. And you cannot turn away. Your destiny is bound with the destinies of others. You must either learn to carry the Universe or be crushed by it. You must grow strong enough to love the world, yet empty enough to sit down at the same table with its worst horrors." - Andrew Boyd_

* * *

Less than fifteen minutes later, Emma and Azazel would return with the other in tow. By then, Erik would have explained his strategy to Mystique, and she would understand her role in it. By then they would have also relocated to the kitchen, where they would take seats around a table with six chairs.

"Everything hinges on our ability to pull this off," Erik told her, after he had explained the rudiments of his plan. "Everything. We can't afford to lose Emma if we can at all help it, but she has the potential to become very, very dangerous to all of us if she is not pulled into line now."

"I get that," Mystique said, because Erik had told her some  though not yet all  of what had happened the night before. Today would mark the beginning of the end of any secrets they had from one another, but they were not there yet.

 _Emma is sad,_ Mystique remembered Azazel telling her. _She wants a man who says what to do._ Mystique repeated that and the rest of what Azazel had told her about Emma to Erik now; only later would she begin to wonder if she had betrayed a confidence by doing so, and then she would dismiss this consideration as wrong-headed. Erik needed to know what was going on.

"That would have been helpful information to have from the beginning," Erik said dryly; Mystique recognized it as the gentle rebuke that it was, and resolved to take such information to him directly in the future. "But yet, I've gathered as much for myself by now. In the beginning, I've deferred to the experience of the old members of the Hellfire Club, which effectively meant to her, and that was only my first mistake.

"We will correct that now. So then. Why do you think Angel left?"

"She's angry with you," Mystique answered without preamble, because Erik had made it abundantly clear that she would help no one by sugar-coating the facts. "It has to do with the gold  the Nazi gold, Erik  but she was mad before then. She doesn't think she's been taken seriously, like she's been locked out of the decision-making process, you know?"

"Angel's astute, isn't she. She always seems to be the first to catch onto the way that the wind is blowing. Of course, she's right  that's exactly what has happened," Erik said, and at the time this surprised Mystique, because she had thought that Angel was imagining the problem, or at least blowing it out of proportion. Over the course of today and in the coming weeks she would learn that quiet a lot had been going on within the Brotherhood that she had not even been aware of. "Though she's not the only one who's been locked out. But that's another thing that's going to change today."

"I'm angry about the gold, too, Erik. We shouldn't have that. It's obscene that we have that gold, and I know you know that. And, Erik, I think that's been messing you up a lot."

"You're right," he said, surprising her again; she had expected to be told why she was wrong, why she was out of line. "When Emma suggested the idea, it seemed like a reasonable plan. It was a good excuse to tie up any lose ends, so far as Shaw's other associates went. And why shouldn't we have everything Shaw had stolen? He'd taken enough from me. But " He stopped, apparently uncertain as to what to say next, and Mystique wondered if he would go on at all. _You'd better just tell me what's going on,_ Mystique thought. _I've been telling you, so you'd better just tell me._ "So I allowed myself to be talked into it. I have been under a great deal of pressure to conform to certain expectations, do you understand? I do not wish to open myself to accusations that I suffer from a division of loyalties."

Again, he hesitated, and it came to Mystique that it was costing him a great deal to discuss these matters with her, even obliquely. He had accepted responsibility for a number of mistakes already, and when the others arrived he insist on taking even more blame for the way things had been going, but she had no illusions that these admissions of guilt were anything but manipulative. It was just tactics, a way of gaining the upper-hand in the coming debate, and that did not bother her  it was smart, actually, and that confirmed some of the faith she'd put in him.

But somehow they'd come into something completely different from all that. She had a sense that she had been shown only the surface-layer of the depths of self-doubt and internal conflict that resided within Erik, but that he had revealed that much willingly felt like both a vote of confidence and a great responsibility. She did not understand what she had done to merit this sort of trust, but she was certain that he'd chosen her for something more than backup for today's plan, something that she would have to work quite hard to live up to. This idea did not carry the weight of terror that it might have months or even days ago. She thought that now she was ready to grow into something stronger than what she had been  that she had been growing  and that she could meet the pressing need to do so more quickly. She was eager to proceed.

"You mean that Emma expects you  us  to continue to work toward Shaw's goals."

"That's part of it, yes."

"Poor her. She's just going to have to learn to live with the disappointment."

The weak smile that provoked was almost shy. "You're getting vicious, did you know that?" he said, with something like admiration. But then the smile faded. "But would that it was as easy as all that.

"These were Shaw's people first  we can't forget that, Raven. It carries certain unavoidable implications, you know. It was  is  difficult for me to know just how to handle them. It is... awkward.

"But I mean to force the issue today. Things have degraded to the point that this is the only way. I will differentiate myself from Shaw, and then I will make them chose."

"Good."

"The end result of all this may be that they simply chose to leave. One or all of them."

She shrugged. "I'll stay," Mystique said, and at that moment she had no considerations beyond Erik, beyond provoking from that high cheek-boned, lean, always-hungry-looking face another flash of teeth. _He is carrying too much of this,_ she thought, _I need to help him more._

Mystique would have said more, but then the others appeared in front of the table with a large plum of red and black smoke.

Angel had been holding Azazel hand when they arrived, but she jerked it away angrily now, even as Janos, standing on Angel's other side, shook off Emma's grasp. Angel looked sullenly angry but not especially surprised  Mystique did not think that either she or Janos could have really believed that they'd be allowed to leave without so much as an explanation or a goodbye. She also didn't think that they really wanted to leave; she suspected this had all been an attention-getting maneuver on Angel's part, a way to force the others to acknowledge her concerns.  

Angel's reaction was not surprising to Mystique, but Janos seemed badly frightened, and Mystique found that both shocking and confusing. He stood very close to Angel, one hand clutching her upper-arm possessively. When Erik stood to greet them, Janos thrust his chin forward almost arrogantly, his neck draw out stiffly, but there was something in his shoulders that seemed to cringe. Janos took a step backward, dragging Angel along with him, but could not go very far; Azazel was behind him, wearing on his face an impassive expression that made something in Mystique's belly twist.

Janos turned his head sharply toward Azazel, spitting something outraged and hurt  Was that hurt? Mystique wondered  at him in Spanish. Whatever he had said, Mystique did not believe Azazel had understood it; at least, his expression had not changed, nor had he even glanced down at Janos. Azazel's eyes were focused on Erik, waiting to see what he would do.

 _Azazel and Janos both expect that there will be reprisals for this,_ Mystique realized suddenly. _They expect that Erik will punish him for running away._ And she wondered for the first time what life under Shaw had been like  not for Emma and Azazel, who due to the nature of their abilities could have walked away any time they wanted, but for Janos.

"Why are you frightened?" Erik asked him, speaking slowly and carefully so Janos would understand him.

Janos drew himself up taller, standing ram-rod straight. "I am not frightened," he said, with cold defiance.

"But you look frightened," Erik said. "And I think I know why." Then he turned to Emma, and now he was suddenly angry, though a moment before he had seemed completely clam, even solicitous. "I had asked for you to explain that I only wished to speak with them. I can see now that you did not bother to follow my instructions."

"She threatened him," Angel said suddenly. "Not out loud, Erik, but I know she did."

Mystique looked sharply toward Erik  this had not been in the plan  but he did not look back at her. Erik blinked once, but that was all the surprise he showed. Then he turned back to Janos. "What did she say to you?"

At first Janos did not answer at first, holding a stubbornly angry silence while he glared up at Erik. Angel said something to him in Spain, her voice irritated, and Janos's expression changed very quickly; first he looked confused, but then some realization seemed to dawn on him, and then he became angry again, though no longer at Erik. "She said that you would cut me in the mouth," he said, and it seemed to Mystique that he was oddly ashamed of this admission. "That you would cut off my... my..." He fumbled for the word, then gave up on English and said, " _Mi lengua._ "

"Your tongue," Erik said, zero emotion in his voice. "She told you that I would cut out your tongue."

Mystique heard herself gasp.

" _Sí,_ " Janos said.

"Erik "  Emma began to say, but Erik whirled on her.

"That's twice now that you've threatened my people," he told her, and his voice had all the merciless precision of a scalpel blade. "Get out. I'm done with you."

"You don't mean that," Emma said. Erik didn't answer. They starred at each other for a long moment, during which Emma was certainly poking around in Erik's head, and as that moment dragged on Mystique saw the realization that yes, Erik did mean it begin to dawn slowly in Emma's face.

None of this had been in the plan. Erik had told Mystique that he meant to discredit Emma, to drive her into a subordinate position so the others would rally around his own leadership once and for all. Mystique had not realized that Emma would make it so easy for him to do so, or that the need for it to happen had been so pressing.

"You won't last a week without me," Emma said. "You haven't the first fucking clue what you're doing here, Erik, and you know it."

"Get out," Erik said again.  

And then she went. And Mystique held her breath, waiting to see if any of the others  if Azazel  would follow her. No one did.

Erik turned to Angel, and now there were no pretenses; now he was all business. "Explain to me why you left. No bullshit, please."

"You can't force us to stay here," Angel told him. "You don't have any right."

"Of course. More to the point; I couldn't actually make you stay, could I? Not if I don't want to risk waking on fire, or else having our Headquarters blown down on top of me.

"I am going to be extremely frank," he said, addressing the entire room now. He was using the same voice he had used on the beach in Cuba; the voice of the prophet, of the revolutionary commander, the voice of Leadership. It did not sound quite as artificial now as it had then, but  Mystique thought he still sounded like someone who was trying very hard to be something he was not, a poor actor shoehorned into a role which even he knew he was unsuited for. "Things have gone very badly here, and this has been my fault.

"We've fallen into a type of malaise. We have not acted, or when we have acted it has often been incorrectly. When you all followed me here, I promised to provide leadership. Guidance. I have not done this. The truth is, I am not even entirely sure that I know how to do so."

"Jesus, Erik," Angel said, and now she sounded like she was more annoyed with him than angry; Mystique figured that was progress. "Everything that's ever happened isn't just your fault, you know?

"There's three things," she went on. "The first is that stupid gold "

"The gold is gone. It will be gotten rid of immediately. Azazel and I will figure out where it belongs, and he will take care of it, yes?"

He glanced toward Azazel, looking for agreement. He got it easily; an indifferent shrug. "I do not see why we should be fighting about money in the first place, Erik. Money I can get for us very easily."

"Thank you. But it's not really about money, you know. The argument is more or less ideological."

He shrugged again, still indifferent; this does not concern me, that shrug said. "But you should not have sent her away, Erik, not in any case."

"No," Angel said. "Emma's the second thing. Telling her to get the hell out was the smartest thing you've done since we got her. There's something really wrong with her, Erik. She's got all these weird apocalyptic ideas about how we're going to build a better world together by burning this one down, then she goes around and whispers poison in our ears to tear us apart. She's self-destructive."

"Emma will be back," Erik said. "You're right about her, Angel, but she needs us, and we simply can't get on without her. She's right about that much.

"But make no mistake; she will no longer be in any position of authority, and she will no longer be calling the shoots. I promised to lead you, and today that will begin."

"Good," Azazel said. Angel didn't say anything, but Mystique took the lack of argument as consent.

"What's the third thing?" Erik asked.

"What the hell are we even _doing_ here, Erik? I mean, do you have a plan at all, or anything?"

"The plan is very simple," Erik told her, and again his voice was rising, taking on that note of command  off key, yes, but Mystique had an idea that he could learn how to sing this song after all, if given enough time. "There is a war coming. In fact, it has already begun. We are going to be ready to fight back."

"How?"

"The first thing is training. Each and everyone of us needs to be ready for whatever the humans can throw at us. As individuals we need to know how to defend ourselves. As a group, we must learn how to work seamlessly together to return any attacks with interest.

"Janos," Erik said, turning to him. "I need you to begin to work seriously on your English. There won't be time when we're under fire to repeat directions or translate commands. You will need to be able to understand everything the first time someone tells you. _Sé que es difícil, pero no hay tiempo para la reproducción, ¿entiendes?_ I will help you. I can show you some tricks, it's not so hard once you commit yourself to it."

" _Bueno_ ," Janos said. Then he made a face at himself, and said, "Okay, Erik. Good. I will do this." Mystique was seized by the sudden realization that she liked Janos quite a lot, though an hour earlier she had hardly even thought about him.

"Angel," Erik said, stepping toward her. "How are your wings?"

"They're ruined, Erik. I told you."

"May I see?"

"Whatever." She turned her back to Erik, and hauled the back of her shirt up to her neck, then reached back to unbuckle her bra.

Mystique moved in beside Erik to watch with fascination as the lines of what looked like tattoo ink became flesh; from the corner of her eye, she saw Azazel shifting his position to watch as well, though he did not come closer. Mystique had only seen this once before, and it was only now that she wondered why she hadn't seen Angel flying again since Cuba. Now she saw that shimmering surface of one of Angel's wings was torn badly, the ragged edges burned. This time, she caught the gasp coming in time to bite it back.

"Does it give you pain?" Erik asked.

"No," Angel said, and Mystique did not think she was lying. "But they don't _work_ anymore, Erik. That's the point."

"I'm going to think about this," he promised her. "Maybe some type of epoxy would do the trick... I will think about it.

"Raven. I want you and Angel both on flight training with Emma."

"Flight training?" Mystique repeated uncertainly, still thinking about Angel's wings. She supposed it must have been Alex who had done that, though she hadn't seen it happen herself.

"Yes. Small planes at first, and helicopters. If either of you have show a talent for it we might move onto something more serious."

"Okay, I can do that," Mystique said, trying to sound as though she believed it. _What does 'more serious' mean?_ she wondered. _Jumbo jets? Bombers?_

"Boats and subs eventually, but we've already got several people who can manage those so the need isn't pressing. I also need you working on self-defense and offense. Your ability is deadly useful, but if you get stuck in a bad situation you will have to use force to get out of it. Do you know how to use a gun?"

"No, Erik, I "

"I will show you. And I want Azazel to work with you on close-range combat; blades and hand-to-hand."

They both glanced toward Azazel, to check what he thought about this. He nodded slowly back at them. A faint smile was playing on the left side of his face. _Oh god_ , Mystique thought, _he likes this plan too much._ __

"Okay," Mystique said again. And then drawing on some daring that she was only beginning to recognize as her own, she asked, "Anything else?"

"Languages," Erik said. "As many as possible. I need you to be able to pass _anywhere_ , Raven. Start with Russian  I think we'll be needing that one soon  after that we can talk about getting you going on one that none of the rest of us have; Chinese or Japanese or Arabic. Azazel will help you."

Later, when she'd had time to sit down and think about all this, Mystique would realize that Erik was using her to build redundancy within the group. Every skill unrelated to Mutant abilities that Shaw's people had brought to the table  languages, piloting, close combat  those were the things Erik wanted her to be able to do. And it was then that she really did begin to understand that he meant to make her his second.

"The second thing is recruitment," Erik went on, addressing the group again. "The details can wait until later  I'm still working out how we can do this without our own cerebro  but I want to have Mutant cells in every major US city by this time next year. Then we can talk about going global.

"The war is coming," he said again. "We will be ready."

His voice dropped again, and now he was Erik once more, rather than Erik-learning-to-be-Magneto. "There is one last thing that needs taken care of.

"Angel and Janos  I need to speak to Raven and Azazel alone for a moment. Would you please wait outside? But don't go to the common room  I'll explain everything shortly."

"What's wrong?" Angel asked sharply, and now for the first time there was a note of fear in her voice. "What happened?" _Angel is astute,_ Erik had said earlier this morning, and Mystique saw it more clearly then ever before now.

"It's alright," Erik said. "No one you know has been hurt. I will explain it in a minute."

And when the other two had left the kitchen, Erik turned to Mystique and Azazel and said,  "I will tell them about Argentina and the body."

 _He's so tired,_ Mystique thought, though it was only now that she saw it. _Has he slept at all?_ "No, Erik," she began, "I can help "

"I'll take care of it," Erik said. "There's something else I want you two to look after."

And then he told them what he needed them to do.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A brief homage to the common fandom theory that Janos is so quiet in the film because Shaw had his tongue cut out appears in this chapter. I've seen many authors and artists play with this idea, but I believe it originated (and please correct me if I'm wrong) with Stormkpr's fic “Riptide in Eight Acts,” which is available on FF.net. This is an excellent fic, you should all read it as soon as possible.
> 
> This chapter kicked my ass. It took way too long to write, and didn't cover nearly as much ground as it needed to, and I'm in general pretty sure it sucks.
> 
> I owe a lot of people replies, and there are a lot of fics and original stories that people are waiting for feedback on (you know who you are). I hope to be able to get to some of these later tonight and tomorrow.
> 
> Thanks for reading.


	16. Chapter 16

_"In this sad world of ours, sorrow comes to all; and, to the young, it comes with bitterest agony, because it takes them unawares. The older have learned to ever expect it." - Abraham Lincoln_

_"No people come into possession of a culture without having paid a heavy price for it." - James Arthur Baldwin_

* * *

"Can you teleport with something this big?" Mystique asked, looking at the thing that Erik had sent them to get.

"It's not so big," Azazel answered, and Mystique supposed that was true; the coffin was pathetically small, three feet of lacquered walnut, the interior padded with black velvet. "But it is correct, yes?"

"I think it's right," Mystique said. _Kiddie-sized caskets,_ she thought, _that's one hell of a thing._   And she thought again of all the lives  Mutant and human  that she had helped save when Charles and Erik and the others had stopped Shaw, and she felt proud of that again. "Are we ready, then?"

"We will go," Azazel said, but instead of doing just that he settled down cross-legged on the funeral home's plushly carpeted floor. Mystique thought for a moment, then did the same; she supposed it would be bad to come back with a coffin too soon, not if Erik was still in the process of explaining things to Angel and Janos.

They sat in silence for a few minutes, then Azazel looked up and asked, "What did Erik mean, when he said, 'Ideological?'"

"I think it's like your political or ethical beliefs," Mystique answers, a little unsure.

"I know what this word is," Azazel said. "But what did Erik mean, that he and Emma are arguing over ideology?"

"Oh. I don't really know," she said, and that was mostly true; after all, she didn't know exactly what laid at the heart of the argument  though later it would become obvious to her  beyond all the obvious things, but the main thing was that she assumed it had something to do with Shaw. And she had decided that she would not talk about Shaw anymore with Azazel if she could avoid it.

"Emma is not normally like this," Azazel said then. "She is difficult  yes, and sometimes very  but not like this."

"Oh," Mystique said again. "What do you thinks going on?"

"I don't know. But something is wrong."

They set in silence for another fifteen minutes, then Azazel stood and took the small coffin by the rails, and Mystique threaded her arm through Azazel's, and they went back home.

They found the others in hotel's outdoor courtyard. It was closed-off out here, surrounded on every side by the hotel's high walls, and so Azazel and Mystique went out into the small, overgrown green space.

There was a large elm tree in the center of the courtyard, grown much too large for the  narrow space available, and its branches scrapped across the windows with every new gust of wind. Erik was at the foot of the tree, a shovel in his hands, digging in a hole  _grave,_ Mystique corrected herself  that was already knee-deep. When he saw them he climbed out of the hole and handed the shovel off to to Janos so he could continue the work while the three of them went back inside.

"It is correct?" Azazel asked again, when Erik saw the coffin.

"Yes," Erik said simply, though he barely stopped to glance at it before picking the body up from the desk. Its feet and thick tail were mounted to a wooden stand with screws, but Erik held his hand over the screws and they came out all on their own, the slab of wood falling away.

When he laid the body down inside the coffin they encountered difficulty. The child was as rigid  as a plastic doll, mounted in a position that was no doubt intended to be menacing, and the tail made it impossible to lay it down flatly against the coffin's padding.

It was at this point that the entire thing began to feel like an extremely bad joke to Mystique, overly long and in infinitely bad taste. She began to fade out on the proceedings, to lose her focus on what was going on around her. Later, she would decide that this was shock and exhaustion, but now she felt only numb and bleary, like there was a foot of cotton stuffing between herself and everything else.

She sat with Angel while the men finished the digging, but they didn't talk at all, and neither of them cried. When the grave was ready they'd all stood around its edge while Erik spoke, but afterward she found that she couldn't really remember what it was he had said, though later she would think that he must have spoken on their situation more than about the child, because what was there, after all, to say about the poor murdered thing? None of them had known it  did not know its name, if it had had one, or even its gender  though they'd claimed it for their own and would mourn it as such, and would do the best they could for it, which was pathetically little; a stolen casket and a backyard grave in the ghetto of a foreign city, none of which would do the slightest thing to help the dead or to take back the smallest fraction of the fear or suffering that the child must have known.

The entire proceeding seemed suddenly maudlin to her. She broke from the others as soon as she could, and went back to her room alone.


	17. Chapter 17

_There is much that is painful in the life of the exiles... There is more poverty and want among them than elsewhere. The proportion of suicides is particularly great among them, and the proportion of those among them whose whole being is one bundle of sick nerves is incredibly, monstrously great. Indeed, how could things be different with tormented people? - Vladimir Lenin_

_One day, you will understand that there exist men and women such as us, without a face and without a name, who have abandoned everything, even their own lives, so that other children can get up everyday without having to remain silent and hiding their faces to confront the world. When that day comes, we, those with no face and no name, will finally be able to rest under the earth. Dead, of course, but happy  - Subcomandante Marcos_

* * *

Hours passed before Mystique felt as though she had her own anger well-enough in hand to rejoin the others.

The trouble in Argentina before they'd even come to that shop, Erik's smoldering rages, Angel's propensity for running away whenever things got hard, Emma's stupidly self-destructive lies, Mystique's own uncertainty and her fears about where all this would take her... these things were all difficult to deal with, but Mystique felt certain that they were symptoms of a much larger problem, one that none of her fellow Mutants could be blamed for personally. None of them had come to the Brotherhood undamaged, and it seemed very important to her that she should be able to remember and forgive this, because she had little doubt that far worse shocks and outrages than Argentina would not be long in coming, and when that happened they would have to be able to find a way to fight through these things without turning on each other.

Anger was nothing new to her, though recently it had become a far more frequent companion, though one she believed she could learn to live with. But she could sense a propensity in herself  weak but there  to behave as Emma had, to lash out at anyone convenient when hurt or angry at the state of the world, even at those who were friends and comrades.

And on the heels of that, another uneasy thought came to her; _I should have spoken with Charles last night._

She'd began to feel more ashamed at herself than angry with anyone else then, and shortly thereafter she'd left her room and had gone downstairs  not to call Charles but to find Erik. He wasn't in any of the usual places  no one was, the Headquarters felt strangely deserted  but she supposed she'd known where he was from the beginning, and in the end she'd gone out into the courtyard to join him.

He was slumped on one of the concrete benches, elbows against knees, head dangling low, and Mystique felt certain that he must be asleep. But when she set down beside him on the bench, the over-grown tendrils of ivy crunching under her, Erik lifted his head to look at her. His voice was worn-out but not groggy, so she supposed that he couldn't have really been sleeping. "I didn't think that was going to work, you know," he said, apropos of nothing but strangely conversational. It took her a moment to understand that he meant the stand-off with Emma. "I was absolutely convinced that the end result of all this would be you and I, out on our asses before noon. If not something a lot worse."

"I don't know why you think that, Erik. Everyone followed you here. We want you to lead us." She had not been entirely sure of this earlier in the day, of course, but now she felt more certain. More than that, she felt that if Erik heard it he would be better able to make it true.

Erik spread his hands. There was dirt under his nails from the work of digging the grave, and Mystique found that she loved him for that dirt, and for all the sweat she knew he'd sweat and all the tears she knew he'd cry and all the blood she knew he'd spill for them.

 _For us,_ she thought. _For us._

"I shouldn't be in charge," Erik said. "It doesn't make _sense_ for me to be in charge. My God, Raven, look  two months ago I didn't even know what it was to have friends! And now I'm meant to _lead_? This is an absurdity. I don't know what I was even thinking, it ought to be Emma "

"It can't be Emma," Mystique said. "Emma's too "

"Yes, yes," Erik agreed, almost viciously. "Emma's too crazy. Emma's too crazy and Janos is too  phlegmatic and Azazel is too feral and Angel is too changeable and you're too "

He stopped, but Mystique said, "What am I, Erik?" because it seemed important that she heard it.

"You are too easily influenced by those around you," he said crisply, and that was not a charge she felt she could argue against.

"So it's down to you."

"Yes. So it's down to me, and I'm the one least suited to it. Raven, there are days when I feel like I am still twelve years old and utterly helpless, and there are other days when I feel as though there is nothing that I am not capable of, and I don't actually know which is worse.

"I'm not good, Raven. I'm wrong inside. Everything that happened, everything Shaw made me into..." He straightened suddenly. "It should be Charles," he said, as though the idea had only just come to him, and his voice sounded like a condemned man reading his own reprieve.

She reached out and took his hand in her own, drew herself closer to him, laid her head on his shoulder, and all of this felt absolutely right. Erik did not argue. Her heart was beating very quickly; she did not believe that there had ever before been a moment in her life when saying the right thing was this important. _It will all be over if he gives it up now,_ she thought. So she said, "Everything that you are, Erik, is what we need now. It can't be Charles, because Charles doesn't see. You are the one who sees. You're the right one, Erik."

He didn't answer her right away, but she felt something give in him, in the muscles of his shoulders and in his clenched hand. Consent or acceptance or surrender... it didn't really matter which, because Mystique recognized all this for what it was; the self-doubt, the unwillingness to shoulder responsibility, the fear of caving under pressure, the attempts to bargain for a different fate... these were the birth pains of a new person. _He will come out stronger on the other side of this,_ she thought, and believed that it might be better if he would cry now. Charles had told her that he cried quite a lot with him  that he and Erik had cried together several times  and she herself had cried alone quite a lot in the weeks following Cuba, though she could not remember now when she had last done so.

But Erik did not cry now. He was very still for what might have been as long as half an hour, and when at last he stirred, and she lifted her head from his shoulder and saw that there was a difference in him already, and that the difference was like that between iron and steel, that he had passed this crisis and had come through it both stronger and lighter, and when he spoke to her the words had no relationship to what he had said earlier, because what he had said earlier was over with, and would never again be spoken of between them.

"You and Azazel?" he said, and it didn't seem like he needed to say more. It didn't seem like she needed to ask how he had guessed.

"Yes."

"Wouldn't have credited that a month ago."

"Yeah, well, I think we work together, for some weird reason."

"You do know what you're doing, right?"

"I haven't the first fucking clue," she admitted, and  strangely enough  Erik began to laugh.

"My dear, I know exactly how you feel," and patted the back of her hand with his free one. "I won't tell you to be careful  you're a big girl, after all  but..."

"'But be careful,'" she finished for him. "I know it."

"He's incredibly dangerous," Erik said. "But not  I don't think, or at least I hope  to us. But be careful, yes." He hesitated, seemed strangely embarrassed, before going on. "Your brother has mentioned that you have... a propensity to play the field."

"Charles talks too much," she said. "And he doesn't have any room to be talking in the first place, considering his own _propensities_ to 'play the field' at a level that's practically professional."   

"Well, that's reassuring to hear," Erik said dryly, but even now she didn't understand what he meant by that. Later, when she finally figured out that two and two made four, she wouldn't even be able to feel especially hurt that Erik hadn't told her out right, because he practically had more than once. But now she took the comment to be about herself and Azazel.

"This is different," she insisted. "I know people say that all the time, and it's cheesy and almost always bullshit anyway, but this really is different. Because we're both Mutants. You get that, right?"

"Of course," he said.

"Anyway, I needed to talk you about something related to that; Azazel wants to take me somewhere  I don't know exactly where, actually, I think it's supposed to be a surprise  but I wanted you to know that if we disappear for a couple of hours tonight or tomorrow that's why."

Erik's face had brightened suddenly, had taken on a look strangely like a child anticipating a holiday. "I know just what he has in mind, but I won't ruin the surprise."

"Tell me, Erik. Come on."

"I won't," he said again. "I couldn't do it justice, anyway. It's like something out of Jules Verne, or Burroughs. You'll love it."

"Those are authors, aren't they?" Mystique asked, dubious, and now Erik's expression turned suddenly tragic.

"You _really_ don't know who they are? Raven, you are breaking my heart right now, did you know that? But I'll only say that you should plan for two days  you won't want to leave any sooner than that  and that you should pack bug spray, and now we're not going to talk about this anymore. It's Azazel's place and Azazel's surprise, he will show you."

" _Da_ , I will show," Azazel said, and Mystique's head had turned very suddenly toward the doorway. He was standing there, watching them, and she wondered quickly how long he had been there, if he had heard her say anything she might have said differently if she'd known that he was listening.

At the same time, she became aware of two additional facts. The first was that he was holding his swords, the blades pointing downward in a way that wasn't especially menacing, but still. The second was that she was still holding Erik's hand. She had taken it up in nothing but friendship, and was quite certain that she had not done anything wrong by doing so, but now that Azazel was watching her she was not certain of how to extradite her hand without giving the impression that she had been caught trying to get away with something. At that moment the swords and the hand seemed like the sort of thing she absolutely should not draw any attention to, as though by ignoring both she could prevent them from taking on relevancy.

Erik too seemed uncertain of how to proceed. They set blinking at each other for what felt like an hour to Mystique, but which was probably closer to  a single minute, and then Emma had come in behind Azazel.

"Erik," she said, as though the others were not even there. "Erik, I was outside... walking around, Erik. And I heard some Puerto Rican kids thinking about how they saw _el diablo_ in the widow of our building last night, and how they wanted to go and find him."

"And what did you do about that?" Erik asked, and the thing in his face now was strangely impassive and very different from what Mystique had seen when he had been speaking with her allow.

"I sent them home. Jesus, Erik, what do you think I did? We don't need any attention here, do we?" She stopped, frowning at herself. It seemed very obvious to Mystique that this was not going the way Emma had hoped, that she had expected to be praised for a job well done. "They think it was just something they saw on the TV," she continued at last. "So. I took care of that for us. So now I think I'm going to go upstairs and take a nap. It was sort of a long night, but I guess you know that "

Erik cut her off, turned to look at Azazel. "Is she simply spreading lies again?" he asked.

Azazel scowled. "She is not lying," he said. He did not, Mystique noted, apologize for his indiscretion, for allowing himself to be seen.

Erik looked back to Emma, and there was a sort of flint in his eyes in his eyes that made Mystique herself want to cringe away. _God,_ she thought, _don't ever let me do anything stupid enough that he looks at me like that._ He stood, separating his hand from Mystique's with a movement as smooth as that of a skilled pick-pocket, and advanced on Emma. When they were quite close to each other, he threw his arm up to point over her shoulder at the doorway.

"You _will_ go upstairs," he agreed.  "You will go upstairs, and you will apologize to Janos  on your knees, if need be  until he believes you and forgives you. And then you will come back here, and perhaps we will discuss then what place  if any  you might have here with the rest of us. I hope that you understand me."

"Okay, Erik. I'm sorry. That's fair. I'll do that," Emma said, and she seemed to be working very hard to look appropriately shame-faced, though there was something sly and glad playing at the edges of her lips, which made Mystique quite certain that she had already figured out that Erik had meant to take her back from the beginning. It was, she supposed, difficult to bluff with a telepath.   

She started back toward the door, but then she paused and turned back toward them. She raised her hands. "Look," she began.

"Don't press your luck," Erik warned.

"I'm not," she said. "I'm really not trying to start anything, but... but you three are _exhausting_ , did you know that? I'm sorry, but you are. I just wanted to say that."  And she had turned and left, and the awkwardness had returned in full in her wake.

"Why do you have those?" Mystique asked, motioning in a way that she hoped was casual at the swords. She was certain that their presence had nothing to do with what Azazel had seen or what he might have thought he saw  he'd simply had them with him when he came down here  but she had difficulty pretending that she was not badly scared by them. _Erik wants him to teach me how to use things like those,_ she thought, and the idea seemed absolutely surreal, unconnected from anything like real life. _Teach me to use them on people._

"We are going now, aren't we?" Azazel said stiffly. She wondered if he was angry with her, and if he would tell her if he was.

She wanted very badly to look back at Erik, to make sure that it was alright with him, but understood that this would diminish her in the eyes of both men, and perhaps cement in Azazel the idea that she had been doing something that she ought not to have been doing.

So she stood up and went to him without looking back, and wrapped her hand around his own, feeling the shaft of the blade that was gripped between his fingers.

And then they went.


	18. Chapter 18

_They gave up their homes, their riches, honors and families. They threw themselves into the movement with a joy, an enthusiasm, a faith which one can feel only once in one's life and which, once lost, can never be found again. It was not yet a political movement. Rather it was like a religious movement, with all the infectious nature of such movements. - Tony Cliff_

_To conceive of a man perfectly free, not subject to the law of necessity, we must conceive of a man outside of space, outside of time, and free from all dependence on cause. -  Leo Tolstoy_

* * *

Things would begin to move very quickly after the trip to Azazel's strange paradise. Erik had promised action, and in the coming months, when it would become more and more difficult to secure even a few hours of time for themselves, Mystique would remember the three days spent here as a sort of hazy fantasy, as distant and incomprehensible to her new life as the lazy days of the summer vacations of her childhood.

They reentered the world at the edge of a stone precipice, and Mystique looked down at the new world unfolded like a picture book below her, and saw that the tips of her toes were hanging in empty space, poking out over the cliff's edge. There was perhaps half a mile's distance between the gray stone on which they were perched and the tips of the vibrantly green trees below.

There would come a day when she could curse the thoughtless bravado that caused Azazel to make that cliff-edge landing, the absolute and unquestioning certainty of his own indestructibility. But now she only looked uncomprehendingly down at the descent below her, the shock of it freezing the air in her lungs. Mystique wanted very badly to step back away from that edge, but her feet seemed quite frozen to the ground.

A sudden wave of vertigo seized her, and she gripped Azazel's hand more tightly. Her other hand flew up to his chest, clutching at the front of his jacket. One of the buttons was torn away, and it bounced off the tip of Azazel's shoe and then rolled over the edge of the cliff. For one horrified moment she thought that he might actually pursue it - his muscles seemed to bunch as though to do just that - but Azazel only watched mournfully as it fell. The button seemed to fall with a terribly deliberate slowness, turning over and over again as it went. It took a surprisingly long time to disappear from sight.

And it was only after the button had faded from view that Azazel seemed to realize that she was frightened. "You will not fall," he said, an air of bemusement in his voice, and his own arm came up around her waist, pressing her tightly against himself as he walked them back from the cliff's edge. When they'd moved some distance from the drop-off he released her, and she took a staggering step away from him - perhaps too quickly. She found that she was breathing very quickly.

In her mind's eye she could still see the button falling, and then suddenly she remembered fat and friendly agent Platt, who had been filled with such happy wonder to simply know that they existed, who had been as pleased as a new father with the discovery of every new Mutant. He'd stood up for them against the other humans, and he'd been so helpful, so nice to her and to the others... and he must have been so scared, right before he died. _That was Azazel. Azazel must have scared him so bad, and I can't lie to myself, I can't afford to pretend that he didn't like doing it._ Now she realized that she had not even thought about Platt since she'd left Charles, and a sense of self-disgust and shame flooded her. And on the heels of that - confusion. Confusion and doubt about every choice she had made up to this point, about what she was even doing here - wherever here even was.

Behind her, Azazel was talking. "You will not -" he began to say again, a note of bewilderment creeping into his voice where before there had been amusement, and then he paused. Mystique's back was to him - she did not see his face. "You think that I will let you fall. Maybe you think that I will make you fall." She could not read his voice. He was such a cypher to her; that was the worst thing, that was what made it so hard.

"Of course not," she said, turning back to him, hoping her face showed the right things. She thought honestly that it would have been better to admit to it, but at the moment she had no idea how to even begin. She bluffed instead. "Don't be ridiculous. It's only that I was surprised. I wasn't expecting something... something like this."

He was watching her with the same impassive expression with which he had watched Erik, when he was waiting to see what would be done with Janos. Later, when she had learned to read him better, she would understand that expression, but now it only made her uneasy. "Where are we, anyway? South America?"

Seemingly almost despite himself, a smile tugged on the right side of Azazel's face. "Look," he said, and pointed over her shoulder.

Resolved not to be frightened, or in the very least not to show that fear, Mystique walked out onto the cliff again, though she did not go as close to the edge as Azazel had taken her before; the height was dizzying, and she felt a very real fear that she might faint dead away if she looked directly down at it again.

Again, she saw the jungle far below, lanced with brilliantly blue rivers. Her eyes followed the course of one of these rivers as it flowed out of the jungle and on across a smooth and golden plain. It was very beautiful. "What am I supposed to be looking at?" she asked uncertainly.

Azazel came up beside her, pointed down at the plain. "See how the river curves like so?" he said, tracing the path of the water in the air with his finger. She nodded. "What is moving there, beside the water?"

Once he had pointed them out, she did see motion there, dark lumbering blotches moving across the horizon. They were small enough at this distance that she could have laid her thumb sideways to block any of them out... but that still seemed strangely - impossibly - large. "Elephants?" she said, knowing as she said it that they were not elephants. They were far too big to be elephants, nor were they the right shape. Elephants didn't have slim, long necks, nor equally lengthy tails. And elephants were not green.

 _Dinosaurs,_ she thought. _Those are dinosaurs._ But it seemed entirely impossible to say that out loud.

"Where are we?" she asked again, her head swimming with the unreality of it.

"I think perhaps it is the Garden, though Erik disagrees" Azazel said. "The Eden Garden, you know? But doubtless we will must have to name it some other way. Erik is calling this place 'the Savage Land.'"

 _Eden,_ she thought, looking down at the plain again. She could see other specks moving across the land now, odd and massive shapes, made tiny and indistinct by the distance. _Eden._ But there was too much unreality in that, so instead she breathed, "The Savage Land."

"Da," he agreed. "But there is much more. Come. You will see." He held a hand out for her, and she felt (not for the first time) that there was a strange vulnerability in that gesture, a thing incongruous to so much else of what she'd seen of him, but no less real for all that. The fear that had rekindled so quickly at the edge of the cliff was still there, a repressive thing, but she took his hand and allowed herself to be lead away from the cliff and down into the brush.

They laced their way slowly down the mountain slope, following a game trail that was wide enough for a truck to pass through, and Mystique found herself surrounded on all sides by a riot of anachronistic life. There seemed no rhyme or reason to the variety of the creatures here. Her head jerking in every direction to try to take it all in, she stared gape-mouthed at  the massive, mossy trees around them and all the things that made their homes among them. They passed by red flowers the size of human faces, and whirling insects as large as birds. The distant calls of gibbons attracted her eyes skyward, and she craned her neck upwards and saw that the treetops were populated by flocks of brightly colored parrots and little brown flying squirrels, and... something else, something feathery but as much lizard-like as bird.

These last creatures were no larger than crows, with mottled brown and tan feathers, and they moved very quick. For all the time she would spend in the Savage Land over the next years, she would never get a clear look at these bird-lizards. Decades later, in the late 90s she would open a news paper and happen across a story about a newly discovered feathered dinosaur, something called archaeopteryx. She would look at the artist's reconstruction and think to herself to herself, _So that's what those things were,_ and she would remember with the closest thing to fondness that she was by then capable of feeling how good it had been to be in the Savage Land with Azazel, before the fall, before everything had gone so badly wrong, how they had felt like the only people in a new and faultless world, and then she would take the paper to Erik and ask him how to pronounce that strange word, 'archaeopteryx.' He would cock an eyebrow at the question but he would tell her, "ar-kee-op-ter-ix," and then she would go back to her guard duty, looking up from the paper only rarely to glance at Robert Kelley in his cell, all his threats and pleas and bargainings only so much white noise while the word 'archaeopteryx' played through her mind like a poem sung in a foreign language.    

She and Azazel were in the mists of the band of placid little apemen before either of them had even realized that they were there. Azazel had come to a sudden stop, then pointed silently at a patch of brush, and as she stared one of the small creatures had emerged from the shadows. Covered in a sleek coat of dun-colored fur, it stood fully upright, though it was no more than four feet tall.

More had come out of the brush, ringing herself and Azazel in an uneven circle, swaying uneasily as they stared at the new-comers with deep brown eyes. "Are they safe?" she asked Azazel softly.

He smiled and said, "These are not yet too human. There are others here  bigger ones, Neanderthals, I think  and those are hunters. Also, there are lizard-men south of here. Those kinds you should be careful of. These little ones are innocent. Only watch that they may bite if you frighten them."

 _Lizard-men?_ she wondered distantly, as she watched the creatures watching her. She thought these might be australopithecine, though they did not look precisely like anything she had seen in Charles's text books.

One of the apemen looked back over his shoulder at the others, and seeming to take some courage from what he saw on their faces he approached Mystique with only a little trepidation. He came to a stop perhaps a foot away from her, and stretched out one long arm to brush her knees with curled fingers before backing away again. Feeling a strange communality with the small creature, Mystique herself looked to Azazel to make sure that everything was aright before crouching down and holding her hand out to the apeman, as she might have to a shy dog. He reached out and pressed the back of his hand briefly against her fingers, and she felt almost shocking strength in his touch, though no menace.

And then entire band came forward, even the children and the little mothers with babies dangling at their sides, each eager for a chance to touch hands with her. She was not yet sure if they were animals or some different sort of people, but it seemed to Mystique that they had decided amongst themselves that she was the same sort of things as they themselves were.

That was an odd feeling, that easy and uncomplicated acceptance, and she'd glanced at Azazel and saw his face, entirely unguarded, and she realized suddenly that he liked these little australopithecines or whatever they were very much, and that made her happy. He had not offered his hand to them, but they had crowded around him anyway. As she watched, one reached toward the edge of Azazel blade while another stretched impetuous fingers into Azazel's hip pocket.

"Nyet!" he said firmly, lifting the swords above his head. They seemed to understand that, because the one who'd been treasure hunting withdrew his fingers very quickly, hooting softly in a way that struck Mystique as apologetic. He folded his hands in front of him, shoulders slumped, looking like nothing so much as a child that had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

"Do they speak?" she asked.

"No," Azazel said, "but they are good at understanding." Then he reached his own hand into his pocket and withdrew a handful of candies that Mystique had not even known were there. He distributed these careful, scolding one of the smaller ones for her greed when she tried to sneak a second.

The thought came unbidden, in strange juxtaposition to the matter of agent Platt, which had not yet left her alone; _I bet he would be really good with children. I -_

   But before she could finish that thought, one of the apemen had let out a sudden shriek, and as though responding to a signal the entire band melted suddenly into the bush. Azazel straightened, alert eyes tracing the surrounding forest.  He had been holding both blades in one hand almost negligently, but now he shifted one to his free hand, gripping each tightly by the shaft.  

"Here," he said, very softly, and she had come, suddenly frightened. There was was something out there  she had understood that much at once  and as she hurried toward Azazel she heard a heavy rustling in the brush to her left, a creaking and snapping of branches. It was huge, whatever it was.

They waited, Mystique arm hooked around Azazel's in case they would need to make a hasty retreat, but the great beast had not attacked them  why should it have, really? They were such small morsels to such a creature  but she had seen the tip of its tail, striped orange and black like the pelt of a tiger, as thick around as a man's thigh, and there was a great and terrible beauty to it. She felt strangely mournful when it passed them by, unseen except for that brief flash of tail. She thought that she might have given away the entire hour with those peaceable little apemen simply for a clear glance at that great hunter.

And once her heart had slowed down she realized what she had probably known long before the giant beast had appeared; that there was much of Azazel to this place, and she was deeply in love with it. It was not at its heart a gentle place, though there could be gentleness in it at times, but that did not negate its power or beauty. She thought that she could accept the things that were dangerous about this Savage Land, in the same way that she believed she could accept what was dangerous about Azazel, in the same way she had very nearly come to accept that she herself would have to become dangerous too, that it would not be her own lot to be gentle.

She told herself that she would lose nothing of worth in this bargain, and put the matter of Platt and all the rest aside, meaning to disregard it once and for all. In fact, that would come back to her again, and soon, and with a vengeance, but for the time being she had folded herself around Azazel, and had felt his arms go around her. She knew very well that those arms were by their nature no gentler than the Savage Land, but that they would be gentle for her, so she had purred into his ear, "Is there some place here that we can be alone?" because she did not want the apemen to come back to interrupt them.

And that had been something easy, something which she knew absolutely that she could do right, because when she pressed herself against him she could feel that he was already hard, so they understood each other perfectly, at least in that much.

They'd moved, and when the solid earth was under them again she found a bed of clover and soft grasses under her feet, and when she looked around she saw that they were on the edge of the plain now. The great herds that had only been specks from the distance were much closer now, without a doubt the strangest menagerie ever seen, elephants and shaggy buffalo grazing amid brontosaurs and triceratops and half a dozen strange and anachronistic species which she could not even put names to, giant kangaroos and creatures that looked something like armadillos but that were the size of small cars and gigantic flightless birds that stood no less than ten feet tall. And she wondered again what sort of place this was, how it could even be at all. But she didn't think about that for very long right then because Azazel mouth was on her skin, and after a few moments of that very little else seemed to matter aside from getting him undressed.

"You have too many buttons," she told him, and paused in the work of unbuttoning them when his lips slid down from her neck and to her chest, her breathing going ragged.

He turned his eyes up at her, startlingly, almost transparently, blue and he'd paused to say, "These buttons may become problem," and his voice was so gravely serious that she began to laugh, only by then he had gotten back to business and the laugh had become a gasp and then something embarrassingly close to a squeal, and he'd wrapped his arms around her shoulders and pressed her down into the grass, coming down on his knees to straddle her, and by mutual and unspoken consensus they had decided to hell with the jacket and all of its buttons, and she'd reached out to undo his fly.

And when they'd finished for that first time he'd sat up across from her, and she had sat as well, watching as he undressed himself methodically. He began with the bottom row of the buttons on the jacket, and when he came to the place with the missing button he frowned, but his fingers went through the motions of unbuttoning the empty space, as though by religious route. He folded every piece neatly as it came off, and before too long there was a pile of clothing on the grass beside them, shoes lined up beside the pile, socks stuffed carefully inside them, and he was quite as naked as she was.

And then they simply sat and looked at each other for some time, Azazel's tail sweeping lazy arches through the grass, the sharp edge cutting through the stalks like a sickle. And then he began to talk, and it was not the empty small talk or drunken philosophizing or pillow promises that they had shared before, but real talk about why he believed the things that he believed, and about where he had been in his life and what he had seen, talk of his hopes and fears and expectations for the future. He'd given her an explanation for every scar that showed and quite a number of the ones which did not, and by the time he had finished the sun had gone down and come back again, for the Savage Land was quite far to the south and this time of year the sun only went away for an hour every night.

When he was finished they had fallen together again, more leisurely this time, and when that was done she had told her share of the story. After that they had slept, curled around each other in the tall grass, and she never so much as considered the threat of predators. When they woke again each found that they had more to say, stories they had forgotten or points that wanted clarification, and so between the love-making and short explorations the talk had gone on. As much as they shared, Mystique did not kid herself into thinking she really understood him  to the contrary, the more he spoke the more likely it seemed that so much of what he was would remain forever a mystery to her, no matter how many ways he might try to explain himself  but she had liked very much to simply hear him speak.

Another three nights would pass before they finally felt compelled to return to reality. By then Mystique had lost count of how many times they had had each other.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Platt" is the name of the actor that played "the man in black" in the film. Since he was never given a name (and why wasn't he? Of the three important human characters in the film two of them don't even get names...) I just decided to go with that. This idea was stolen from my GF, user name unforg0tt3n.
> 
> Oh, and for anyone who only knows movie-canon (and there's nothing wrong with this) the Savage Land appears in a handful of different stories, I promise I didn't just pull this out of my ass. I tweaked it a lot, because I'm not all that familiar with some of the comic-canon myself and since there's so much variation that I feel like I can get away with that, but that such a place exists is canonish.


	19. Chapter 19

_"I believe we shared something else, unique to us at that time  the chance to make one grand and uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith, which might never occur again ... few of us yet knew that we had come to a war of antique muskets and jamming machine-guns, to be led by brave but bewildered amateurs. But for the moment there were no half-truths and hesitations, we had found a new freedom, almost a new morality, and discovered a new Satan - fascism." -  Laurie Lee_

* * *

There had to have been parents, Azazel supposed  "Most people have parents, after all," he told Mystique as she sat across from him on that Savage Land plain  but of them he remembered nothing at all.

The first thing was the _detsky hom_ , he said - the children's house, the orphanage.

That was the first thing, but it was not, after all, a usual orphanage, set deep in the countryside was it was, and surrounded by check-points and security patrols. His caretakers were extremely concerned that his social development should be correct, and so there were other children there. These were all human children, true orphans who left the grounds of the children's home no more often than he did, which was to say never at all. They were not very bad children  the teachers worked hard to keep their crueler instincts well in hand, and they gave Azazel no more trouble than they did the fat boy or the girl with the clubbed foot.

But the children bored him. The teachers were even worse. They were so eager to integrate him into the society of the children and of themselves, to teach him to be a good citizen and loyal servant to their country, but he'd understood from the very beginning that he was not the same as the others, and had no true place there. He was wild by his very nature, but they intended to make him tame, and that was unacceptable to him.

The teachers spoke of the need for the children to become good communists, but this concept was meaningless to him. And he had an idea that they were more concerned with making him into a good human, or else a good pet to humans, not that he would have been able to frame it in those terms at that age. At the time he simply felt smothered by too much attention. The teachers were intent on keeping him from developing too high an opinion of himself, but it was not difficult to sense that everything important that happened in the children's home had to do with him, though the reasons for this were still very unclear to him. He understood also that the adults were all at least a little frightened of him, in a way that they did not fear the other children, though they hid this well.

"It was not bad there," he told Mystique now. "I don't want you misunderstand. It was not for me like it was for our Erik," he said, and Mystique wondered how much of that Azazel really understood, what put together for himself and what he had been told  who had told him, for that matter. Emma might have run her mouth, of course, but Mystique was struck by the sudden conviction that Erik himself had told Azazel, that the two of them had already had this conversation. "But they wanted too much to control me. I have my own interests. I have my own aesthetic. I don't like to be given too much directions."

He would come to understand only later that he had been something of a state secret, and that they had almost certainly intended to groom him for something exciting. "Espionage, I think. Or perhaps as an assassin. I am very good at assassinations  I have told Erik this, that my talents should be made good use of." Had he realized this at the time he might have stayed put, but he'd seen very little reason to remain where he was, not when the entire world was open to him.

Mystique frowned. "How old were you when you left?"

Azazel paused, thinking hard. "Seven years, I think. Perhaps a bit smaller." While he was at the children's home he had been adamant about going to the cities, which he had seen in the picture books and which he could visualize so clearly in his mind's eye. This had been denied him  the teachers had been kind about it, but they were always kind, and certainly this was tactics  it was understood that he couldn't be held with force. It was always the same way, every time he asked; they would defer discussion or change the subject deftly, and he had eventually come to understand that they had no intention of granting his wish. So he simply washed his hands of their nonsense and took himself.

He spent almost an entire hour in Red Square before things began to go badly. People had stared, but he had stared right back at them and so had not felt unjustly treated, but no one had bothered him. He supposed that most of the people had assumed that he was simply wearing a very strange but cunning costume. They rationalized him to themselves, and then they went on with their own business.

The problem began not because he was a Mutant but because he was a child alone and unaccompanied on the streets of Moscow. A grandmother, leading her own grandson along by the hand, had approached Azazel, doubtlessly concerned for his safety. She crouched down to his level and said to him, "Look how nicely you've painted your face!"

"I'm not wearing _paint_ ," he told her haughtily, proud even from that small age of his skin and of what he was. He had noticed a long time before this that all the best things were red. The flag was red, and people made much of it, carrying it about carefully and saluting it and singing songs to it. The covers of many of the most important books were red as well, though he was yet too small to read these, and would not find them especially interesting once he had gotten older. The propaganda posters in the square were on the main red, though black often figured prominently in them as well  that was the day when he decided that black would be his other color from now on  and the city center itself was called Red Square, and it was in his estimation a very fine place. To be told that he was not really red felt like a very grave insult.

But the old woman hadn't taken him seriously, that much was plain. "Where are you parents?" she asked him.

"I don't have any," he told her matter-of-fact, and she seemed startled by that for a moment, but then she seemed to decide to herself that he was simply telling lies.

"Then where is your grandmother?" she demanded, sterner now. "Who is looking after you?"

"I will look after myself from now on," he told her. "I think that I can do it well enough." He had decided this only as he said it, but once he had spoken the words his mind was made up; he simply would not go back to the school.

The grandmother's face had gone absolutely stormy at this, but before she could speak again her grandson had reached out a hand to tug on Azazel's tail. Back at the school he'd long since learned how to respond to such insults, and he'd jerked his tail free and slapped the boy across the back of the hand with the flat of its tip.

He insisted to Mystique now that he had not even stuck the other child especially hard, but he had chosen to be a baby about it, and had begun to howl. A moment later, the old woman had realized that Azazel's tail was not just some costume prop but a very real thing, as alive as the rest of him, and she'd begun to shout.

It had seemed like a good time to leave.

Well, but he would come back again later, and in any case there were always other cities  no end to all the cities, really, and each one a great and new mystery. At first he did not recognize the necessity of hiding, but eventually he came to understand that the trouble that always seemed to chase him could be avoided by keeping out of sight. As a matter of his own convenience, he began to limit his explorations to the night, and to keep to the shadows and empty places. It was not difficult to find good places to sleep  many flats were empty in the day time, after all. As for food, that was simple as well  he just took what he wanted when he wanted it.

"Yeah, but weren't you _scared_?" Mystique asked, considering how little of her own early years she remembered. Everything before Charles was so vague and foggy, but she was quite certain that she had been scared all the time.

"I do not become frightened like other people," he told her matter-of-factly. "Only very rarely have I been frightened."

Things went on in this manner for several years, and eventually he drifted out of Russia and then finally outside of the boarders of USSR. He was not sure why he had chosen Spain, except that the winter had been especially miserable that year and he felt the need for some dramatic change. Once he was there he found that he liked it very much. He learned the rudiments of the language by lurking in shadowy alleys and under open windows, and though he had no one to converse with by the end of his first year in Spain he felt as though he could understand almost all of what he heard. By then he was, he thought, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old.

He had not counted on becoming ill, but he had  suddenly and with great severity. He'd gone to ground somewhere  he was not to his day exactly sure where  wrapped in misery and delirium.

Somehow the priest had found him. When Azazel had returned to his own mind he found himself abed in a small stone cottage. There was a fire burning in the fireplace and the priest was at his side, one hand holding Azazel's hand while the other fiddled with a chain of wooden beads. Azazel had not particularly liked having his hand held in that way, but he tried to take it away from the priest he found himself weak as a new baby, quite helpless to free himself. He had tried to transport himself somewhere else, but that too had failed  even the effort of the thought left him feeling woozy and breathless.

The priest had noticed what he was awake, had smiled down at him, though the worry was heavy in his eyes. He said something and it took Azazel a moment to understand though the wool in his brain that he had been asked what his name was Azazel supposed that he had at some time had a name  as with parents, most people had names  but he'd long since forgotten what it had been. But before he could think of a way to say all this he had faded away again.

The priest had been an odd fellow, even when measured against other priests, and it had taken Azazel a long time to understand the other man's interests in him, his intentions. He had believed that he understood Spanish very well, but now he found that understanding and speaking were two entirely different matters. He was tired all the time, and even brief conversations were completely exhausting. But the priest did not mind that he kept mostly quiet  the priest, in fact, loved the sound of his own voice very much, and was quite capable of holding up both ends of the conversation by himself.

But before too long Azazel found that he liked the sound of the priest's voice as well, for it had a light and musical quality to it. Azazel's own voice had gone rusty from disuse over the the years, and had taken on an embarrassing coarseness that it would never lose. The priest had a book that he liked to read from, and though there was a great deal of bather and nonsense in that book there were also stories that he liked very much; tales of giants, of women who spoke to snakes and men who flew on bird's wings and parted oceans with a sweep of the arms, who walked on water and healed the sick with a touch of the hands and who could conquer even death. He understood these stories to be biographies, tales of real people who had had quite a lot in common with Azazel himself, and so he'd been very happy to hear about them.

The priest did not push Azazel to talk about his origins, but eventually it became obvious that the man had made certain assumptions. A few days after he'd woken the priest had presented him with a set of the same beads which he always seemed to have on hand, tipped at the end with a wooden cross. Azazel had taken the thing dubiously  it was really quite ugly and so he hadn't wanted it, but the priest had been very pleased when he'd looped the thing around his neck. Azazel supposed that he did owe the man a little something, so he'd kept the silly thing on for a short while.

After a while it became evident that the priest saw him as some sort of project, perhaps a challenge sent to him by his god. Something of Azazel's early education had stuck after all, because he found himself to be a reflexive atheist. He had little trouble believing in the great abilities Samson or Moses or Jesus were said to have manifested  he himself was in possession of great abilities, after all  but he found the idea that these abilities had come to them through the agency of some Higher Power was to Azazel deeply hilarious.

The priest had expected resistance from his prospective convert, had in fact foreseen a violent battle for Azazel's soul between himself and the forces that had imbued his very flesh with such a devilish appearance. He had not expected to be laughed off lightly, or to be teased when he continued to press his attack. The entire experience left him feeling very cross indeed.

As annoying as the priest could be, Azazel had stuck around for quite sometime. He'd an interest in learning to read the priest's book for himself and so the priest had taught him, enduring with Christ-like patience all the taunts and jokes at his expense that Azazel came up with when he attempted to push their discussions in a theological direction. Once he'd finished with the bible and had set it aside Azazel had discovered the potentiality of other books, had in fact devoured the priest's small library. He liked especially the chronicles of the lives of the saints and the guides to different angels and demons, as these were often illustrated with pictures of all sorts of strange-looking people, including many with looks which bore a surprising similarity to  Azazel's own.

The priest had up until this point been very insistent that he should be given a name by which he could call him, so he had taken from one of the books the name 'Azazel' and told the priest that he should call him that. Though the Azazel from the book  goat-legged and horned  did not resemble him in the way that some of the other creatures had, he very much liked the sound of the name; he thought of it as something that sounded equally excellent in the priest's sing-song voice as it did when spoken in his own gruff and hissing voice. And, of course it had annoyed the priest terribly, which was all part of the fun.

Through all this, Azazel had been vaguely aware that there was a civil war going on  when the priest was not trying to make a Christian of Azazel he was talking politics, something which held no more interests to Azazel than theology. Though Azazel did not pay much attention to any of it, the priest complained so frequently of the fascists and of the shortsightedness of Rome that Azazel could not avoid taking in something.

The priest was in fact a very odd man, a shepherd whose flock had been stolen from him, preaching in the wilderness to a crimson-skinned boy who took entirely too much pleasure in mocking him. The priest had by then come to understand that Azazel's nature was not as demonic as his aspect that originally led him to believe, but nonetheless the boy was strangely limited in his affections. He no longer had a pulpit from which to denounce Franco, and so he rallied against him to the boy, who seemed content enough to listen to the flow of his voice if not the content of his words.  

Azazel did understand that the priest had had a falling-out with his superiors, and that this had left him isolated from his friends and comrades, and that all of this had to do somehow with politics, but beyond that he had simply not cared. The cottage was secluded, and so far as Azazel was concerned the war hardly touched them until one day it did.

Azazel had been gone for hardly an hour, off finding something good for the two of them to eat. The priest rallied against these thefts, named it sin, but Azazel had learned very quickly that when the cupboards of the cottage were empty he would nonetheless eat what Azazel brought him, despite all his complaints and denunciations. He'd returned to a ruin, the burned out cottage still smoking, the priest dead inside, his arms tied behind his back and a bullet hole between his eyes.   

Azazel had not realized how much he enjoyed being able to sleep in the same place every night until that privilege was taken from him. Neither had he realized how much he had liked his buzzing fly of a priest-friend until the man was dead. He mourned also the loss of the books, which he believed at the time to be unique, the only ones of that sort in all the world. He had an idea that it had been the fascists that had taken these things from him  his books, his bed, the good voice of the priest who spoken to him frequently with great annoyance but never with fear  though he was and would remain quite fuzzy on the issue of what a fascist actually was.

The priest had been in contact with members of the _Republicanos_ forces  Azazel had paid attention to that much at least, because often when the EPR men had come calling the priest had required Azazel to stay out of sight, though there were a rare two or three to which Azazel had been introduced. He tracked the ones he had known down now, for he understood that these men could point out to him who the fascists were and where they might be found. This was important to him; he had not wanted to waste his time killing the wrong people.

That he was deadly useful no one among the _Republicanos_ had been able to deny. He had quite a lot to offer and so they'd take him, tail and all. He'd been placed in one of the _Brigadas Internacionales_  "the International Brigades," he translated for Mystique now  and that had suited him as well as anything else.

He'd still been young  no more than sixteen, though by then he'd lost track of his birthdays  but many of the men he'd fought with were were younger in their hearts than he believed he had ever been; volunteers from the distant corners of the world, they were; poets and artists and intellectuals, poor solders many of them, but consumed with a passion that he understood on an emotional level, even if the politics of it all remained supremely uninteresting to him. They were men in possession of a great inner sense of morality, and he'd liked many of them very much.

"Working with Erik is something like working with those comrades," he told Mystique now. "Erik has the same instinct to seek justice."

There was of course still a distance between himself and the other men, something which was ultimately as unbridgeable as the distance between himself and the children at the detsky hom or between himself and the priest, but the camaraderie of battle had a way of diminishing these differences to the point where they were easily forgotten.

Alcohol was helpful in this as well. One night he had drunk Earnest Hemmingway under the table. Afterward a _comrada_ had told him that Hemmingway had written a poem about the experience; when Azazel had gotten English he'd read through Hemmingway's collected works, and though he liked it all very much he had seen nothing there that reminded him especially of himself.

There many other atheists among the Republican fighters, and Azazel had enjoyed meeting these men, because often he gave them more of a fright than he did the rare Christians in their ranks. He evoked in them a sudden and startlingly need to reevaluated their positions on the existence the devil if not of god, but after they'd gotten used to him many seemed to take amusement from his looks. One had called him "subversive," and though he had not at the time understood the English word it had felt like a compliment.  

On the other hand (and almost always overlapping) there were also quite a lot of devout communists in the _Brigadas_ and he found many of these men deeply annoying in their insistence upon discussing politics. They were as bad as Christians for putting things on him, for trying to lock him into the little box of their own perceptions. Christians saw his tail and his skin and thought that they knew something about him, but the communists from America and England and France and wherever else heard his accent and thought him to be one of their own, and he did not care for that.

Eventually he began to tell these men that he was an anarchist. Not because he had any special interest in anarchism  he cared to understand the finer ideological points of this word no more than he did 'communists' or 'fascist'  but because he had learned that there was no other answer that annoyed communists quite so reliably. Also, he had the right color palate for an anarchist.

His _comradas_ called him a Russian, but he did not feel especially Russian, or especially like anything else for that matter. He was just Azazel, and he certainly thought that was enough. It was a very fine thing to be Azazel, after all. There was no one else like him in all the world.

He was not there to debate ideology or to join any particular political group. He'd come to kill fascists, and his interest in doing so was purely personal, having to do only with the loss of his bed and his books and his priest. If his priest had been killed by Republicans  and this was a common enough occurrence, certainly he himself would kill a number of clergy before it was all over  he might have as easily sided with the Nationalists. He was not too interested in the particulars.

He'd come to get pay-back for what had been taken from him, but in the end he'd stayed because he'd found that he was very good at this work, and because he enjoyed it.

Azazel never felt that the Republicans had exploited his talents to their full potential, though certainly he was kept busy. Before long he was sabotaging weapons, planting bombs, raiding supply bunkers. Very few of the fascists who saw him lived to tell about it, but nonetheless he had begun to develop quite a reputation among them, of which he was duly proud.

During this period he had discovered the unreliability of guns, having seen too often how rusty rifles could backfire and how the ancient machine guns were apt to overheat and jam, so he'd taken up knives, which were more reliable and a far greater pleasure to work with.

The fighting had ended in 1939, and he had not been able to understand why. No one would explain this to him, at least not in a manner that was not entirely too too convoluted to be understood. It seemed to him that there was no lack of fascists left in the world, so he did not understand why they were stopping now. He might have been perfectly pleased to go on fighting forever  he'd by then he was in the battle simply for the thrill of it. But the men he had fought and drunk with had begun to drift back to their own home countries, and this had left him feeling badly disillusioned.

He was fed up, so he'd looked into his mind's eye and found a place where there were no people whatsoever, and he'd gone there. To the Savage Land, though he hadn't had that name for it then; the influence of the priest was still strong in him, so he'd thought of the place as his own Eden.

It provided as well for him as the Eden from the stories had provided for the first people  you could not throw a stone here without hitting fruit or meat  and so he had only needed to return to what he thought of as the Real World periodically. He'd gotten a hammock and had built himself a nice little shelter, and that was really all he needed; in other sections of the Savage Land the weather could be quite cold, but here it was always tropical.

He was functionally illiterate in his own first language, which seemed to him shameful, so he'd set out to correct that. He'd begun with picture books and had progressed very quickly past a Young Pioneers guide book and onto to Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Pushkin, Achmatova, Gorky, dozens of others.

Some of his _camradas_ in the war had explained to him the concept of libraries, so he understood now where to go to get new books, and also that had burned with the priest's cottage had not been the only ones of their kind. Nonetheless, the loss of those first volumes had put in him a great respect for the sanctity of books, and he was careful to keep the ones he borrowed clean and dry, and to return them always to where he had found them.

During these returned trips to the Real World it became event to him that there was another war on, this one much larger and uglier than the last, but he'd paid little mind to it. The betrayal of before still stung, and he had decided to waste no more of his time fighting in the wars of men. He had always understood that he was no part of them, but now he felt ready to put that understanding into total action, to cut himself off from that alien race for good and all.

At first this was more difficult than he had imagined. He felt very acutely that the time spent with the priest and with his former _comradas_ had weakened him, because sometimes now he felt lonely, while before he'd met the priest he could not remember feeling any such thing. But the Savage Land had the apemen, which for all their limitations and deficiencies could make pleasant and undemanding company, and he always had his books.

Here Mystique stopped him, asking tentatively, "You don't seen any contradiction between rejecting human society and enjoying books written by humans?"

"No," he told her. "I think that the best art  books or paintings or architecture or anything like that  can... transcend humanness. These things are bigger and better than anything human... do you understand?"

"The intellectual equivalent of a mutation."

"Yes, absolutely. We were born of humans, the same as my books were. Are we less because of it? Of course we are not. It is exactly the same thing."   

After several years it had come to him that he wanted to learn how to read English. There was no particular reason for this, aside perhaps for some fond memories of Hemingway and a handful of other anglophone comrades from the war. Anyway, he had needed a new project, so he'd gotten the proper study books and set to work.

This was far more challenging than learning to read Spanish or Russian had been, as he'd had no one to speak the language with, or to even teach him proper pronunciation of words. Still, he'd made progress, and eventually he had felt himself ready to move past the study books and onto proper children's books.   

He'd had no particular reason to chose to visit that library in Boston, but he had met Emma there and that had been the start of everything else, so he supposed it was something like fate. "I do not believe in God," he told Mystique. "But sometimes I feel as though something has directed my life, as though I have been placed step-by-step where I needed to be when it was necessary that I should be there. Have you ever felt this way?"

Mystique never had, but she nodded now simply because she wanted to believe there had been some direction, some purpose toward which she might even now be moving. She thought that if she were to come into the possession of such a belief it would become much easier to be brave about the future.

He had been absolutely certain that the library was empty, and yet Emma had been able to sneak up on him, and at the time this had been astonishing. Later, he would learn that there was something about some Mutants that kept him from sensing them the way he could sense humans. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to this strange blind-spot in his ability, and yet he could not overcome it. "I cannot sense Emma," he told her, "but I have no difficulty even for here sensing your Xavier, so it does not seem to be based on type of mutation. Isn't that strange?"

"Can you sense me?" she asked.

"Of course. And Erik and Janos as well. But Angel is in my blind-spot, as was Shaw. I don't understand it."

Emma had been volunteering at this particular library, and had mistaken him for a burglar.

"But you were a burglar " Mystique began.

" _Nyet_ ," he insisted. "I was borrowing, not steal."

She'd hit him with a psychic punch that had dropped him like a bag of hammers and had left his head aching for the next three days, but once she'd gotten a look at him she'd warmed up immediately. "Too warm, maybe," he said now, and for the first time since he'd begun he seemed hesitant to go on.

Emma had gotten him a cup of hot coco and had told him again and again how sorry she was, that she hadn't realized that he was one of _theirs_ , that she would not have hurt him like that if she'd realized he was another Mutant.

Azazel had never heard the word _Mutant_ before, did not even know what it meant, but once she'd spoken it he understood at once that it suited him.

"That's strange, too, isn't it?" Mystique said. "That Emma and Charles came up with the same word for us independently?"

"I said already  I think there is some element of fate in all of this," Azazel told her, and went on with the story. It had taken him a bit longer to accept the idea that he and Emma were the same thing than it had taken him to accept the word Mutant, as he had been very taken with the idea that he was absolutely one of a kind. Nonetheless, he had been pleased by the revelation.

His spoken English had been almost impossibly bad back then, but Emma had plucked the question right from his brain. "No," she said. "I used to know one other, but he was killed. It was because he was a Mutant."

The fire that had come upon him when he'd found the burned-out cottage and the dead priest had come upon him then, but it was much hotter now, though he had never so much as met this murdered boy. "Where?" he had demanded. "Where?"

"Honey, don't worry about that," Emma had told him. "I've already taken care of that."

The words had crystallized in his disappointment. "These dead already?"

"No," she told him, "But they wish every minute that they were," and this had impressed him greatly.

She was ruthless, and he liked that about her, though very soon he had come to understand that there was also a worrisome brittleness to her. She was very easily hurt, and though he had never intended to do hurt her it somehow came about that he did.

"Almost at once I began to think of her as family," he told Mystique. "As a little sister. She was too young  sixteen, I think, and still very much a child."

Up until now he been looking straight at her, but now his eyes went to his lap, evasive. "Also, the interest simply was not there. No more than it had been for human women. Emma is very beautiful, I'm sure... and it is not her fault that she looks as she does. But I do not think I could want a woman who looks the way she does.

"She sensed this of course," he went on, "and she took this as insult. She did not believe that it was... fair. I did knew as well that it was not fair... but the interest was not there..." He glanced up at Mystique briefly, as though fearing an explosion. She was silent. Azazel looked back down at his hands.

After a long pause, he added, "I don't want you misunderstand me. I was not interested in human men, either."

And this struck Mystique as such an outlandishly random thing to say that she nearly choked on her own laughter.

"But this is common problem with our men!" he insisted, looking up at her again. She frowned at that, puzzled, still not understanding what everyone else seemed to take for granted, and he misinterpreted that frown. "I don't mean _problem_ ," he said, and now it sounded to her that he was trying to correct for some insult he felt he'd given her. "It is not problem to me if they are... strange. Why should I worry about this thing? But this strangeness seems to be very common among Mutant men, and I am somewhat troubled by the question of the propagation of the species. Do you see?"

"No," Mystique said flatly. "I have no idea what you're talking about."  

He'd blinked at her slowly, two times, as though trying to decide what game she was playing at, and then he'd moved on quickly with the story.

"I met Emma in '55, I think. It was in 1958 that she met Shaw.

"Between then we were often in contact with each other, but she was angry with me much of the time, and that made things... difficult." He'd described the Savage Land to her, but she had refused to go there. Emma said that she'd looked at his memories of it and that it struck her as dirty and dangerous and boring. She also said that she knew when he'd been around the apemen, because she could smell them on his clothing and they stunk. He'd known this was a lie, by then he'd discovered that she lied quite frequently, and most often when she was feeling hurt, but it had taken away some of the joy those creatures gave him.

"But she was so different after she met Shaw..." She had been like a different person, really. Shaw had told her all the things that she needed to hear to be happy  that she was competent and smart and sexy and that he loved her. All of these things save the last were true and had certainly always been true, but it seemed to Azazel that she had believed in none of them until Shaw had told her so. And though they were true things, Azazel had somehow doubted Shaw's sincerity.

"Sometimes... Emma makes mistakes with her ability," Azazel said. "She sees only what is on the top-layer of a person's mind. What they want her to see there, or else what she's looking for anyway.

"She can't read Erik, you know. Almost not at all."

"I didn't know that."

"Yes, what did she say? 'His brain is like a labyrinth, and it's all either pitch black or blindingly bright.' What is a labyrinth?"

"A big maze," she said. "One so big that people get lost in it and starve to death. That's what a labyrinth is."

"Of course, I should have guessed from context," Azazel said, and went on.

Shaw had one other Mutant with him, a young Spanish man who had seemed to still be half a boy. When they'd first met Janos had at struck Azazel as strangely timid, though that shyness had disappeared completely when he had demonstrated his power to Azazel.

Azazel had shown off his own power, and Janos had been duly impressed, and afterward they had set to talking. They spoke easily together, and Azazel had told Janos that he had been in the _Brigadas Internacionales_. The other man had seemed interested, had told him that his own father had died in the battle of Guadalajara but that his mother did not like to speak of it.

Azazel said that he himself had not been at Guadalajara, but had offered to tell him what things had been like where he had been stationed, and Janos said that he would like that very much. However, he had stopped Azazel only a few minutes later. "I'm sorry..." he began diffidently, "I'm sure that I'm only being stupid... but..."

"But?" Azazel prompted.

"You are a teleporter, right? You can teleport anywhere you want?"

"Anywhere," Azazel agree.

"So...  I'm sorry, I know I must be missing something  why didn't you just teleport yourself to where Franco was, and kill him?"

Azazel had stared at him for a long time, blinking, and later Janos would tell him that all the blood had gone from his face, that his skin had become absolutely pink. He had wheeled away from Janos, roaring curses while he paced the deck of Shaw's yacht, so angry at his own stupidity that he thought he might choke on his own rage. When he exhausted his supply of Russian obscenities he'd turned to Spanish, and here he'd been able to draw on a very extensive list  it was not for nothing that he'd spent so much time among solders  before turning to his limited but growing collection of English vulgarities.

Eventually, Shaw and Emma had come from their quarters. They stood on the deck above him, looking down on Azazel and Janos. "What are we cussing about?" Emma had called down.

By then Azazel had been going for nearly twenty minutes, had in fact shouted himself hoarse. He was beginning to wind down, though he felt no less angry with himself now as he had before. Above him, Shaw turned to Emma and said in a stage-whisper, "Do you think he's run out of bad words?" In his regular voice he had called down, "Try _'Verdammte Scheisse'_  that's a good one."

"That's actually not especially creative, dear," Emma told him, and recommended to Azazel, "Stupidfuck shit-for-brains."

"Yes, yes, and those too!" Azazel shouted up at them, and then he had stalked back to Janos. "We will go and kill him now. You will come with me."

"No point now," Janos said, glancing quickly up at Shaw and then down again. It would not take Azazel long to discover the source of much of that timidity; Shaw had a unique set of tactics for keeping each of them in line. He was hands-off with Azazel himself  understood was well as Azazel's first teachers had that he would not stick around to be abused  but Janos hadn't had the same bargaining chips. "He'll die with all the rest, anyway."

And so there had been the plan, the details of which Azazel had always been fuzzy about. The entire thing had stuck him as overly complicated and perhaps a bit too extreme; it seemed to him that there was a lot of room for things to go wrong, both along the way and after execution  and all of that before Erik had come into the picture. He certainly felt that Mutants were entitled to inherit the Earth, and the sooner the better, but was dubious about the desirability of a post-nuclear world. Still, Shaw had seemed confident that he knew what he was doing and Azazel had not felt at the time that he was especially justified in questioning the tactical maneuverings of others, not after the absurdity of the matter of Franco. The big picture had never held much interest to him, and he'd been happy enough to be pointed in the direction of a couple of very good fights.

"Is that everything?" Mystique asked him.

"No," Azazel told her, "But I am worn out with talking now."

And so for a while they had found other things to do.


	20. Chapter 20

_"Absolute moral pacifism is a product of civilization. It is a response by the exploited to their trauma. It is an unnatural state. It is a state that is nurtured by exploiter and victim alike, to perpetuate their exploitative and destructive relationship. If a mother mouse is willing to put her life on the line by attacking someone eight thousand times her size, what the hell is wrong with us? How pathetic it is that we construct religious and spiritual philosophies that tell us that to attack even those who are killing those we most dearly loveor those we pretend we loveis to not love at all. Love does not imply pacifism. - Derrick Jensen_

* * *

They might have stayed in the Savage Land forever  even for all the long-toothed monsters that stalked in the jungle and plains, things were easy there, uncomplicated  and Mystique had an idea that Azazel might have been content to do just that. But by the fourth night she began t become uneasy about what they might be missing out on back at the Headquarters. 

"One more day," Azazel said, when she brooked the question of going back, and he took her to see the polar regions of the Savage Land, where mastodons and wooly rhinoceros roamed among prides of saber-toothed cats and cave bears the size of small cars. 

"It's summer here now," he told her, though ice and snow still clung to the ground in the shady places. "It will be much colder later. You will need coat, maybe," he said, and smiled with half his face, as though he thought he'd told a very excellent joke.

They found an abandoned neanderthal camp, and Mystique picked up a broken spear and turned it over in her hands, seeing how the stone head was attached to the shaft, and she thought, _There are people at Oxford who would cut their own mother's throat just to touch this,_ and then she put it down on the ground carefully. She figured that she'd been shown enough here to revolutionize no less than a dozen fields of study, that she'd been witness to things that maybe millions of academics and lay people could only dream of seeing, but she did not like the thought. It seemed to cheapen the experience, and it made her feel strangely selfish, and it was that she began to think again of going back to Chicago. There had been one new wonder after another, and by then an entire week had gone by, or maybe eight or nine days, she was no longer exactly sure, and this time she had not asked to go back but had told Azazel that they simply must. 

She had felt uneasy approaching him about this. She believed that she trusted him, and yet there was no question of her dependency in this; there was perhaps no other way in the world in or out of the Savage Land except with Azazel, and that made her vaguely nervous. 

"We will go," he said, easily enough. "But first  you want to see the secret to this place, yes?" 

And the temptation of that had been too much to resist, even as worried as she was by then that they might have missed something important back home or that Erik might have become angry that they'd been gone so long. So she'd agreed, and took his hand, and when they'd traveled through the smokey plain between worlds she found herself somewhere eerier still. 

Looking around the place that Azazel had taken her to, she understood it to be some sort of control room. The walls and floor and ceiling were metallic, and seemed to generate their own low, ambient light. Gigantic, oddly flat television screens lines one wall, and though the pictures were blurred by a thick coating of dust she saw that they showed imagines of different areas of the Savage Land in living color. Other screens showed walls of indecipherable text, and bellow the screens were banks of control panels. There were chairs in front of some of those panels, but they were the strangest chairs Mystique had ever seen. There was something subtly wrong about them, as though they had been built for people who were both taller and more finely built than was normal, and who's legs and arms didn't bend exact the way one would expect a person's legs and arms to bend. 

She took a few uneasy steps forward, and Azazel called out sharply, "Don't touch anything," and when she turned back at his voice she saw that she had left a trail of footprints in the dust that layered the floor. 

"What is this place?"

"It is great mystery," he told her, "And I am not sure. But I think it is here that the Savage Land is made to work... that these machines run it somehow, control the temperatures and so on. That is why I say not to touch them. It would not be good to change anything." 

_They're like computers or something,_ she thought, remembering the transistorized computer that Charles's stepfather had taken them to see demonstrated at the University of Manchester back in '53  "The first of its kind," he'd said, "and we're building a better one already."

"But who built these?" she said, and though she had been speaking to herself Azazel answered. 

"Another mystery... but I think this; It was spacemen, or else men who lived before men were. Either way, it was very long time ago, and they are gone from here now." 

Aliens, she thought, and a new wave of unreality gripped her. She looked around again, and now the place seemed even stranger; the way the walls glowed with an almost unnoticeable light, under the layer of dust generations, the bizarre chairs, the level at which the screens were hung, even the angles of the place seemed foreign, part of a thing that was incomprehensibly strange and utterly divorced from anything that had something to do with her. And she found that she was frightened, and that she wanted very badly to be away from this place that had been built by people she didn't know and had no desire to know. 

"Can we go home now, please?" she said, and was frightened further by the little girl tremor that had come into her voice, and it came to her very suddenly that this was how so many humans must feel when confronted by the reality of Mutants, as though something intolerably alien had been imposed upon a reality that had hitherto been comprehensible, reducing one to the state of a cowering child, frightened of the monster in the dark, of the stranger with the power to do harm, and briefly she felt badly for them, had almost even understood their fear, even god help her the hate, and  

And then they had gone, and a moment later they had been in the kitchen of the Headquarters, and Angel and Emma and Janos were there, sitting around one of the tables and playing cards, the normalcy of them and the kitchen and everything in the kitchen after the last week  _Or was it ten days? Eleven?_  was in its own way deeply shocking. It brought her back into herself, refocused her around the concerns of the group. 

"Look who's finally back," Angel said, smiling as she set her hand of cards down face-down on the table. She stood up and opened her arms, and Mystique had stepped into the hug, and that felt good, that felt like home. And she realized suddenly that it was not only her sense of duty to Erik that had brought her back here, but that she had missed the others very badly.

And then Angel stepped back and turned around, pulling up the back of her shirt and bringing out her wings. She glanced back at Mystique to say, "Check this out," and Mystique saw that the raggedy burned sections of Angel's wings had been neatly trim away, and that the tear had been neatly patched by some sort of polymer fabric, which had been glued seamlessly to the tissue of her wing. 

Angel's wings began to buzz suddenly, and Mystique stepped back, giving her room as she lit into the air and spun around to face her. Angel's hands came out, grabbing Mystique's, and she fluttered upward, pulling her up onto her tiptoes. All this was achieved effortlessly, with a natural ease that was exhilarating to watch. 

"Almost good as new," Angel said, landing again, and now there was a sheen in her large eyes that looked very like potential tears. _She hasn't looked happy like this since Cuba,_ Mystique thought, and it came to her that more than Angel's wings must have gotten patched up while she and Azazel were gone. 

"I'm so happy for you," she told Angel. "Erik found a way to do it, right? I knew he would."

"Actually, it was Hank that did it," Angel said, almost tentatively. "But it was Erik's idea to ask him."

"Hank," Mystique repeatedly flatly, and it came to her as clearly as if she was herself a telepath that there was something here that Angel didn't want to tell her, something bad. Something that Mystique was not at all sure she wanted to know. 

"Yeah. Like I said, Erik got the idea that we should take a road trip down there and see what Hank might be able to do for me. So we "

"Of course, that wasn't the only reason," Emma said idly, without looking up from her cards. "Erik's been missing his little boyfriend quite a lot lately."

"Stop it," Angel told her, between gritted teeth. And at the same time Janos said, "Why don't you shut your mouth with that noise? It is a very _stupid_ lie." 

"Whatever, believe what you want. But are we playing this game or not?" Emma said. 

"Are you serious?" Angel demanded. "Fuck the cards, Emma." She ran a hand through her hair and turned back to Mystique. "Look " she started. 

"Charles," Mystique said. 

"Yeah. Look... I mean, I don't think I'm the one who should be telling you this, okay? You should go talk to Erik. Or just call Charles, you know? I really think you should call him. He really needs to talk to you right now, I think." 

"I... I don't understand what's going on," Mystique said. 

"Your brother was hurt really bad in Cuba, okay? More than we realized. Even Erik didn't know, we only found out when we got to... Look, you just really need to go talk to Erik."

Mystique glanced back at Azazel, who had been silent through all this, and caught something on his face. _He knew something about this,_ she thought with absolute certainty. _He did._

But this was not the time for that. "Erik's in his room?" she asked, and Angel nodded. 

So she headed for his room, but met him instead of the stairs. He was wearing his jacket, clearly on his way somewhere, but he stopped on the landing above her when he saw that she was coming up. So she stopped too. "Tell me," she said, and though she had not spoken loudly the enclosed space of stairwell amplified the words. 

His reply was likewise amplified, the words reverberating off the walls, echoing themselves. "Your brother isn't going to walk anymore. He is paralyzed, and it is permanent. I did this to him." 

Later, she would wonder if there was something wrong with her, because her first thought when he told her this was not of Charles, but of Erik; of finding some way to comfort him, of absolving him. "No, Erik. No," she said unsteadily. "It's not your fault... it's just something that happened. It just happened, that's all." 

"Nothing 'just happens,'" Erik said, and the seething anger in his voice was frightening, almost repellent. "And I think I have already explained that you do nothing for me by lying."

Mystique realized that she was biting her lower lip; she stopped, waited to see what Erik would do. He started down the stairs again, and she fell in beside him; he didn't tell her not to. "Azazel knew about this," she said, and Erik turned his head to glance at her but did not pause. 

"Yes, I suppose he must have known something. He went back for them, you know, in Cuba."

"I didn't know that."

"Charles told me. It came out with all the rest. I had not even considered what might happen after we left. I was very angry with him... and I didn't even think of it until later. They might have all been killed if he hadn't gone back.

"I keep fucking things up," he said, and Mystique wanted to argue about that, too, but knew that it would not be welcomed. 

"Where are we going?" she asked instead, because by then they were at the front door, and she changed as Erik reached to open it  same old Raven. 

"I need to make some phone calls," Erik said. 

"Charles?"

"In part. Will you talk with him?"

By then they were on the sidewalk, the shadows of the brick tenement houses looming over them. _All those windows_ , she thought, looking up at them. _All those lives behind the windows._ "Okay," she said, but there was something in her voice that made Erik turn his head to look at her. 

"Would you explain to me exactly why you're so angry with him?"

"I'm not," she said quickly. But that wasn't exactly true, and glancing at Erik she saw that he knew that. So she went on, "I mean, I am, but sometimes I think that I shouldn't be, that I'm not being fair to him or whatever, that none of this is really his fault after all, he's just doing the best he can in an impossible fucking situation. You know? But then I get to feeling like that's all bullshit, that he _picked_ his side and it's the wrong one and he should goddamn well _know_ that, and it all makes me madder than I want to be. How can someone so smart be that _bloody stupid_ , you know? So I go back and forth on it all the time. You get what I mean?"

"Too well," he said dryly. 

She could have went on. She could have said, _The other thing is that this doesn't really even have that much to do with him, anyway. This is about me trying to figure out who I am without him, and it's about me protecting him from the things that are in my head right now, because there's too much here that would frighten or hurt him, and I can't trust him to stay out on his own. If he saw all this he'd hate me, or he'd want to try to fix me, or he'd want to try to blame himself for it, and I can't take any of that right now. This is all hard enough already without all of that._

But all of that had too much to do with herself, and that wasn't what Erik needed, so instead she asked, "Do you love him?" 

Erik let out a bark of astonished laughter. "That's an... awkward question, Raven. I don't know what to say."

"Just do you? Because, I just wanted you to know that I won't hate you if you do. He's easy to love, you know? Even as frustrating as it is to love him, it's hard not to." 

"I don't know, honestly. And I don't think it's going to make much a of difference if I do or don't. Either way, things are going to be the way that they're going to be. That's all."

"Yeah, I guess so," she said. "But I love you. I mean, I love all of you. I love Azazel and Janos and Angel and even Emma." 

"Even Emma?" he repeated, and under the streetlights she saw a bemused sort of smile flit across his face. 

"Yeah, I do. And I know, right, like that and fifteen cents will get me a cup of coffee, but "

"No, don't make light of it. That's good, Raven. Hold on to that if you can."

"Okay," she said, and she would try. In the end, she wouldn't be allowed to keep a hold of it, but she would try. 

On the corner ahead of them she could see a phone booth. Erik picked up his pace, and she did the same to match him. And when Erik picked up the receiver and dialed the number it was not lost on Mystique that he did so from memory and without hesitation. He held the phone out to her, and she was surprised enough by that to take it without thinking, because she had imagined that Erik would speak first, and when she tried to pass it back to him Erik backed out of the reach of the cord, his hands held above his head with the palms facing outward, and then Charles's voice had come on the line, so she'd had no choice but to bring the phone to ear and say, "Hello, Charles," though by then her heart was racing with panic. 

"Raven! Is that you?" he said, and though the surprised happiness in his voice cut, felt in fact almost like an accusation, she found she was glad to hear it. 

She found also that it was not as difficult or as awkward to speak with him as she had expected, because she said, "Yeah, of course. Look  I only just heard, I'm sorry I didn't call you sooner... How are you?" 

And he told her, putting a brave face on it. "I wasn't even in the hospital as long as you would have thought," he said, and "It was a bit trying at first, but things are settling into a rhythm now," and "The psychical therapy is going really well. Honestly, I don't think I've ever been this fit in my entire life  you should see my arms, Raven, I'm actually getting _muscles_ ," and sure, it was all an act  she didn't have any doubt of that  but the point was that as long as Charles was carrying on with his act she didn't have to bring out her own, and before she hardly knew it the operator was on the line, telling them that their ten minutes was up and if they wanted to continue their call she'd have to deposit another dime. 

"I'm going to put more money in, but Erik wants to talk to you now, okay?" she told Charles. "It's been really good talking to you. I'll call again soon, okay?" And Charles said goodbye and she handed the phone over to Erik, and he and Charles had made small talk about Angel's patched wing and the weather and so on, and when his ten minutes was up Erik made his farewells and hung up the receiver. 

Then he picked it up again, dialing a different number, and this time he deposited substantially more coins in the money slot. "Should I go?" Mystique asked, thinking that he might want privacy. 

"No, you're fine " Erik began to say, and then another voice had come over the line, and Erik surprised her by answering it in German  or at least something that sounded almost but somehow not quite like German to her. 

The conversation ran much longer than the one with Charles, and in the beginning Erik's tone struck her as lightly cajoling. But after a few minutes he began to look strained, and before long that made it from his face and into his voice. Shortly thereafter he began to become transparently angry, and his voice had gotten much louder, nearly shouting. The reply on the other end of the line was sharp  Mystique could not understand the words, but it seemed to her that the man Erik was speaking to was much older and not at all inclined to take nonsense  and when Erik replied his voice was stiff with curtsey and much softer. Erik seemed to be rallying his patience to try his argument again, but whatever he wanted the voice on the other end would not give it to him. 

Near the end he had slipped back into English, apparently out of simple frustration, though it was an English with a much thicker brogue than he usually employed. "I can't be more frank about this," he said. "You need to let me bring you here. I can protect you here." The voice on the other end had demurred, and not long after that Erik had seemed to accept defeat, and had said his goodbyes and hung up the phone with a caution that showed Mystique that he wanted to slam it down. 

"Who was that?" Mystique asked, not sure that she should be asking. 

"A stubborn old man," Erik said, and ran a hand down his face, which was looking suddenly drawn and somehow strangely young. "It's just family stuff, Raven, don't worry about." And he'd stepped out of the phone booth and started back toward the Headquarters, and Mystique fell in beside him. 

"Tomorrow, we are getting serious," he said, without turning his head to look at her. 

"Okay," she said.


	21. Chapter 21

_Once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot uneducate the person who has learned to read. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. We have seen the future, and the future is ours. - César Chávez_

_Sometimes if you want to get rid of the gun, you have to pick the gun up." - Huey P. Newton_

* * *

Things began moving in earnest the next morning, and they would not slow down again for another four years, when everything they would build in the interim would be torn apart completely.

The guns were the first thing.

The morning after the phone calls, Erik took Mystique up to his room. There were half a dozen handguns laid out on his desk, each of a different type, and Erik said to her, "I thought we'd start small. Pick one up."

She didn't want to. None of the guns looked exactly the same  some had stubby barrels, others had muzzles that were long and slim, some were all sharp angles and others were shaped with smooth, flowing curves, some were black and some gray, some had wood-finished grips and others of plastic  but each and every one stuck her as being horrendously ugly.

Nonetheless, Mystique picked on up, choosing almost at random a medium-sized gun with a brown grip. It looked something more like a toy than some of the others, and she would think later that was why she had picked it up, but once it was in her hand she was astonished by the weight of it. _Not a toy._

Mystique looked back to Erik, questioningly, and found that he was grinning widely, like a boy at show-and-tell. "What?"

"Oh, nothing. It's just a little funny that you picked that one. That's a Makarov. It's a Russian gun." She snorted, rolled her eyes at him, and he went on, more seriously now, "It's a fine enough weapon. Not elegant  there aren't many moving parts to it  but it has reasonable stopping power. 

"That one's yours now. You keep it."

She wanted to argue with that. She wanted to tell him, _I don't want it. It's ugly and mean-looking and so are all the others. It feels like a snake in my hand, and I'm afraid that I'm the one that's going to get bitten._ But instead she heard herself say, "Charles abhors guns."

"Of course he does," Erik said, and she heard the condescension in his voice, and was glad that she had not said, _I'm frightened of this thing,_ though she supposed he knew anyway. "Do you know what he told me, back before Cuba? He told me that there was no reason that we should concern ourselves with self-defense. He said that the government would not move against us, because we had 'common enemies' in Shaw and the Russians."

"I think Charles spends a lot of time living in his own world."

"It must be a pleasant place."

"I guess. I'd like to visit there someday."

And Erik laughed at that, but then they got down to business. He'd given her the names and models of the other guns on the table, "Colt 45 and "Walther PPK" and others, discussing their strengths and weakness. He explained the difference between a revolver and a pistol, and about different calibers and types of ammunition and their relative merits.

Then showed her how the safety worked on the Makarov, advising, "Keep the safety on this one unless you're goddamned sure you aren't going to drop it. The firing pin is free-floating."

"I don't understand what that means."

"If you drop it on its muzzle it may go off. So don't drop it."

"Oh," she said, and began to wish that she'd picked a different gun.

`Finally, he showed her how to load and unload the Makarov, and watched while she repeated what he had done. "Is it unloaded now?" he asked, and when she told him that it was he said, "Wrong. There is no such thing as an unloaded gun. You will treat all guns at all times as though they are loaded, you understand?" She told him that she did, and puzzled for a moment where this caution had come from - at the mansion he had handled his guns with almost frightening carelessness - but then the answer was obvious when she thought about it.

After that they went to a gun range. At some point while she and Azazel had been away the Brotherhood had acquired a car - she did not ask when or how, but simply got behind the wheel when instructed to do so and followed Erik's directions to the range.

Once there, she watched Erik fire the gun at the target, studying the way he held his body and the way he held the gun. When it was her turn, she aped his stance as perfectly as she could while wearing a smaller, feminine body, and stared at the distant target. But she hesitated to fire, afraid of the noise and of the kick-back, convinced that it would hurt though it had not seemed to hurt Erik. Afraid also of the raw power of the gun, a dead weight in her hand that yet possessed a terrible potentiality. The target at the end of the range was man-shaped, the outline of a body with the bulls-eye placed where a person's heart would be. 

And while she was still rallying the nerve to pull the trigger, the gun went off in her hand, and she let out a squawk of surprise and she didn't just nearly drop the damned thing - she almost flung it away before she remembered Erik's warning about the firing pin.

It was with that thought of Erik that she realized what must have happened, and outraged she whirled on him. She did not forget the gun in her hand, but was mindful of it, keeping it pointed at the ground; Erik's power was, after all, no guarantee that the gun was safe to mess around with.

"See?" he said. "It's as easy as that. You do it yourself this time."

"You go to hell," she said, and the small section of herself that was seething was distantly shocked by her own words. "If you _ever_ do anything like that again, Erik, I swear to God -"

He put his hands up, palms out as though in surrender, but she didn't think he looked especially repentant. She turned away from Erik, still fuming, and took reckless aim at the target, and before she could talk herself out of it she pulled the trigger, five times in quick secession, and saw a compact cluster of holes blossom around the bulls-eye.

Behind her she heard Erik say, " Well. Huh."

"I just did it the way you showed me," she said, suddenly appalled with herself. She sat the gun down on the counter - carefully - and said, "That's all I did."

"Well done," he said, and when she looked up at him she saw that he was proud of her, maybe  strange to think  even a little awed, so she'd picked up the gun again and they went on.

In the coming days, they would move quickly to deer rifles and shotguns, among other things. In certain cases, such as with the AK-47s and Remington 700 sniper rifles, they avoided the gun range, traveling with Azazel to secluded areas. "No reason to attract unnecessary attention, after all," Erik would say.

She would find, as the weeks began to pass, that she had a startlingly proficiency with each new weapon, and that  like so much else about the life she was living now  was in distressing conflict with the sort of person she had seen herself as before she'd left Charles. She knew that Erik was impressed with her progress, but she wanted to argue with that approval, to say, _I'm just copying what you can do. That's all. It really has nothing to do with me._

The same day Erik gave her the gun Azazel had come to her room with the knives. She'd let him in when he knocked, and he'd stood across from her and said, with strange formality, as though it were something he had been taught to say, "For you, a bowie knife and a stiletto," and Mystique took them from him and went to sit on the edge of her bed, and he sat down beside her as she studied the two blades, turning one then the other over in her hands.

The thing he'd called a stiletto was a sender, black carbon blade with a needle-like point. It was a small thing, though vicious-looking. The bowie knife was, on the other hand, almost ludicrously large, nearly a small sword. The clip-pointed blade alone was nearly two feet long, and the horn-handle added another eight inches to its length. The blade was shinning steel, and when she turned it sideways she saw her own face reflected in its surface, as clearly as if it were a mirror.

"I think that they are correct for you. I thought, something small and easily hidden, and so the stiletto. You can kill a man very quietly with such a thing, I will show you. And I thought also something fiercer, but not too heavy to be carried easily, something that can be worn in a sheath, and so the bowie knife."

"Thank you," she said, and wondered at the strange place she'd come to in her life, where the men she loved made gifts to her of implements of murder. But what she said was, "I'm building quite an arsenal," and she motioned with her eyes toward the desk, where the gun rested.

Azazel saw it and chuckled, low and rough. "Did Erik give you a Makarov? He's a funny one." But then he added seriously, "Do not drop this gun."  
The matter of the guns drew on (she believed, or at least told her self) nothing more than the basic instincts for mimicry that accompanied her ability, but sparring with Azazel was something quite different, and not a thing that she felt she could afford to have delusions about; in a dangerous way it had something very much in common with making love, two bodies acting and reacting to each other, caught in the dance and in the conflict, seeking to anticipate the other's next move, both entirely given over to the experience and the moment, to the sweat and grunts and pounding hearts and straining muscles, and if sex had not already been permanently linked in her mind with power and with violence it became so over the course of that fall. 

The matter of the blades remained theoretical. Azazel could explain in which situations one was better suited than the other, and could demonstrate how they were used, when to thrust and when to slash, and which parts of the human body were most vulnerable to any given line of attack, but intellectually she did not believe in the possibility of really using them against another person.

Azazel, she had known from their first meeting, was a chaos in battle, a whirling dervish, at once everywhere and nowhere. For a time she simply copied his own style, letting him show her how to move her body and how to use the blades, but as the lessons went on she began to understand her own self better and discovered ways of doing things that played to her own strengths. At the same time, she also began to note his weak points, which were especially evident because they had decided that he shouldn't use his ability to teleport during these sessions. He had not been trained in any sense of the word, and relied entirely on instinct and impulse and on the passion of one who considered himself absolutely untouchable. 

And the first time Mystique executed a move that would have left him dead had it been in earnest he looked at her like he had on that first night together, like he had found everything he ever looking for, and after that they'd gotten nothing else productive done that day. 

The flying lessons with Emma weren't going too poorly either, though this was not coming to her as easily as some of the other tasks Erik had set her to. Emma was not happy at having been drafted into the role of instructor, and was not shy about making that known, but Mystique was learning how to handle her. Sometimes the armistices between them ran for entire days, to the point that Mystique thought that they might even be starting to like each other before Emma opened with some new volley.

Mystique thought that Azazel had been right. There had been something going on with Emma  something going wrong  when she'd first joined them, but it seemed like she had it better under control now. The only thing was that she seemed very tired as of late. Complaints that the other members of the Brotherhood were exhausting to her kept coming, and she'd taken to spending a lot of time alone in her room. Erik said she was shirking, but Mystique wasn't entirely sure of that; when pressed, Emma had once or twice grudgingly admitted to migraines and to stomach aches.  

Things were changing so quickly  she was changing so quickly, in ways that she never would have believed possible  and that was frightening, but it was exhilarating, too. She felt as though she were blowing past all her limits to uncover a person she had never known existed, and the thrill of this self-discovery was endless. 

Mystique had changed rooms, too. She did not move in with Azazel, but had taken the room directly beside his own, which were connected by a common doorway. There was hardly a night that went by when she didn't end up in his bed, or he in hers, but they would not have worked in the same room; Azazel had his own aesthetic, as he was so fond of affirming, and though his sense of organization was rigid, the rules of this order were to remain an incomprehensible mystery to her. His room, with its flickering shadows and eclectic sentiments, was so much of him, but she could not have stood the constant need to navigate the candles and stacks of books, the hangings of silk and the constantly rotating section of borrowed paintings and treasures every day. It would have been impossible to study under such conditions, and she had quite a lot of studying to do. 

There were the Russian lessons, which took up what little time she had left over after everything else, but there was also the matter of the news papers. Erik had rented an over-sized P.O. box, and every day he came home with bundles of papers, thirty or forty different papers from all over the country and the world. They were all supposed to be reading these papers every day, looking for leads on Mutants; unusual crimes, odd stories of people with uncommon talents or abilities, anything strange or out of the ordinary.

They located a few leads this way, but nothing that had panned out. There'd been a couple of missions, low-key trips during which no one had been badly hurt and nothing especially exciting had happened, but they'd found only one actual Mutant this way, and he had declined to join the Brotherhood. Erik called these missions good practice, but it was clear that he knew that they were starting to spine their wheels again, and that he was frustrated with this. 

Almost two months into the new training regiment, Erik came home with the usual load of papers. Mystique knew from having accompanied him on a few of these trips to the post office that he often stopped to use random pay phones, so she was not surprised when he sat his burden down on the table where she and Angel were scanning yesterday's headlines, and said, "I've been talking to your brother." 

"Yeah?" she said, without talking her eyes from her work. 

"Yes. He and Hank have rebuilt Cerebro at the mansion. He's given me some potential leads on Mutants." 

She did look up then, startled and suddenly suspicious. "Why?" 

"The reason he gave me or the real reason?" he asked, but this was apparently rhetorical, because he went on, "He said this lot could use some help. I've do doubt of that, but I have a strong suspicion that he gave me these particular names because they aren't the sort that would fit in well at his school, if you know what I mean."

Mystique wasn't entirely sure that she did know what he meant, but things would become much clear later, once she began to meet the individuals that Charles had picked out for them. 

"Still, it's something," Erik went on. "We'll get started tomorrow."

Then he said, "Come up to my room when you're done here. I need to speak to you in private for a moment."

When Erik had gone, Angel looked at her and said, "What's that about, do you think?" 

"I don't know," Mystique said, but she was pretty sure she did. 

So when they'd finished with the papers, Mystique had taken herself up to Erik's room, which was so different from Azazel's, so rational in its organization and in its neatness, and he'd motioned her into a second chair before slinking back into his own. 

"You're doing very well," he told her frankly, leaning toward her in his chair, his big hands folded over his knees. "You've made quite a lot of progress very quickly."

Modesty  false or otherwise  only annoyed him, so she said, "I know I have." 

"So now, what is next for you?" he went on, and she recognized this as another rhetorical question and did not answer. "I need you to do something for me." 

"Okay, Erik," she said. "I will."

"I need for you to kill someone for me," he said, and though a chill struck Mystique when he said that it was not one of surprised. She was not at all surprised. She had known for the beginning that this was coming, after all. 

"Who?" Mystique said, expecting to be given specific directions, to be given a target and a reason. She did not think it would be too difficult for her if Erik gave her a good reason. 

"It doesn't really matter," Erik said. "A cop. A guard. Whoever gets in your way the next time we're on a mission."

Something twisted in Mystique's gut when he said that, but she believed that her face remained impassive, though she found herself blinking very quickly. She willed herself to stop.

"Do you understand why I'm asking you to do this?"

"Yes," she said. They were all killers here, everyone except her. Even Angel was a killer. She could not expect to hold herself separate in this. 

"It will become easier once you've done it for the first time," he went on. "You will not feel the same hesitation that you are feeling now. It's very important that we should get that hesitation out of the way as soon as possible, because it is the sort of thing that could very easily get you or one of the others hurt." 

He stopped, watching her. Mystique knew he was waiting for her to say something, but she did not trust herself to speak. After a moment he went on. "The first Mutant on the list Charles gave me is being held in a jail in New Orleans, and that is where we will go tomorrow. It would be best if you did it then." 

"You won't tell Charles? I don't want Charles to know." 

"Of course not." 

"Okay," Mystique said. "Okay, Erik. I will."

But nothing would turn out as simply as that.


	22. Chapter 22

_"My prayer for women of the twenty-first century: harden your hearts and learn to kill." - Andrea Dworkin_

_"Laissez les bons temps rouler" (Let the good times roll). - Unknown_

* * *

The guard looked too much like agent Platt, and that was what fucked her up. Or at least that was what Mystique would tell herself later, when she was looking for some way  any way except for the obvious  to explain her failure to herself. 

The thing was, up until the guard showed up, things had been going pretty well. Azazel had transported them into the jail  which was just a little podunk back-river place with three cells, two of which were empty  and she'd been ready to stand and fight with the others, the gun drawn and surprisingly steady in her hands  but aside for the prisoners the room had been empty. 

Mystique had believe then that she was off the hook, at least for the time being, and it was only then that her hands had begun to shake, causing her to fumble as she reholstered the gun against her hip. The relief that came with that, and the crash of nerves that accompanied that relief, might have given her pause then, had there been time to consider it. 

But Erik was approaching the larger cell, the one which was occupied, and she hurried to follow. Azazel, Angel and Janos went with her, but Emma hung back, staying as far away from the stink and mess as possible. 

Mystique had bailed Charles out often enough to know a drunk tank when she saw one, but she noted now that the ones they had in Oxford were a great deal nicer than the one here; she was pretty sure that she'd never before seen  or for that matter, _smelled_  a place that was this objectively disgusting. An old man with a yellowed beard snored on one of the bunks, curled beneath a filthy brown trench coat. Through the entire proceedings of the next ten minutes, this man would hardly so much as stir. 

On the opposite bunk a second man sat slouched over his hands, watching them from behind a limp curtain of curly red hair. His face was lean, dark with stubble, guarded. The edges of his eyes glowed with a faint red light, something you wouldn't notice unless you knew to look for cues like that, something that might have been passed off for too much drink and not enough sleep. And, point of fact, he certainly had the look of someone who was catastrophically hungover. 

So that was their man. 

Erik stopped in front of the bars and said, "Brother, I have a proposition for you." 

The man didn't stand, didn't so much as straighten up, but he turned his head and looked at Mystique long and hard from over his folded hands. It seemed to her that the red rims of his eyes glowed a little brighter, and then he said... something. It was a flowing mishmash of mush-mouthed sounds, all of which seemed to bleed together without any distinctive words. She had a vague and frustrating sense that she should be able to understand what he was saying, but none of it signified.  
    
Mystique felt Azazel's hand on her shoulder, and turned to see that both he and Janos were looking at her expectantly. Azazel looked puzzled, one bushy eyebrow cocked quizzically, but Janos seemed nearly panicked with confusion. " _Qué?_ " he said, obviously desperate for some explanation.

She shrugged helplessly at them and mouthed silently, "I don't have any idea," before turning back to Erik.   

"Was that French?" Mystique asked him, knowing even as she said it that it certainly was not, but at a loss as to what else it might have been. 

"Vaguely," Erik, and that dry note that said he was at once amused and annoyed was in his voice. "It's creole  a pidgin language. It's easier to suss it out if you know French, but I'm not " He paused, frowning, and there was a look of concentration on his face, a sort of inward contemplation that told Mystique that he was trying to work through what the other Mutant had said. 

" _Parlez plus lentement, s'il vous plaît,_ " he said, at last, apparently in defeat. "Say it again, but not so fast this time, okay?" 

The man in the cell repeated what he had said, more slowly now, and this time Mystique felt as though she was picking up on at least half of what he was saying, though it still didn't add up to anything sensible. "I axed dem," he said, motioning at Mystique and Azazel with a gesture that was surprisingly graceful and fluid, "what dey did t' get s'heavy a gris-gris put on them?" No one answered at first, and he added, "Ya gonna tell me, 'r what?" 

"Sorry... gris-gris?" Mystique repeated dubiously. 

"Ya'll ain't from 'round here, yeah?" 

"Not exactly," Erik said. 

"Nah, I guess ya ain't. _Gris-gris,_ " he repeated, as though saying the word again explained it. "Gris-gris. A spell. Dat voodoo witch magic that puts da power in ya, ya'll see?" 

_Don't laugh,_ Mystique told herself. _This is what he really believes. This is the way he's found of explaining himself to himself._

Erik began to say something, but then he stopped; the other Mutant went on. "I be knowin' a little bit about dat magic  can't be showin' ya'll in here, might make one hell'va a bang  but I be knowin' more den a little bout dat."

"We know you do," Erik agreed. "That's why we're here." 

"Now dat's something I like ta be hearin'. I binlookin' f'somebody with da same spell on dem for a long time. I wanna know who done dis ta us, so I can go 'n talk ta her. I ain't mad about it, exactly, ya know, but I wanna know why she done it for."

"I think these matters might be more easily discussed elsewhere," Erik suggested, "in more comfortable accommodations. You will come with us." 

"F'sure. I was meanin' ta find mahself mo' comfortable commodations anyway, just soon as dis headache clear up," he said. 

"You mean you were going to wait for the cops to turn you out onto the street, once you'd sobered up," Emma said from the corner. "Which is what happens every week, isn't it, if not more frequently?" 

"She some sorta witch, 'r what?" the other Mutant asked Erik. 

"Something like that," Erik said. And he started to say something else, but Emma spoke over him.

"So this is the sort of recruit Charles means to find for us," she said. "I can tell already that this is all going to go swimmingly, Erik." Erik didn't respond, but from where she was standing Mystique could see the muscles in his neck go ridged. 

The new Mutant turned his head to look at her, and there was baffled hurt in his eyes.   _He's a nice guy,_ Mystique decided then, and later she would suppose that was when she knew he wouldn't stay with the Brotherhood. "There's alot in dis world worth drinkin' over," he said, softly. Probably because he didn't want Emma to hear. But of course she would, even if she couldn't pick up on his voice from where she was standing. 

"Look, I'm Erik Lehnsherr," Erik said, and when he held his hand out the bars of the cell bent outward. 

"Remy LeBeau," the other man said, reaching through the gap to shake Erik's hand, "And f'sure I do like dat trick a' yours." 

"I'll show you another," Erik said, stepping back. There was click, and the door of the cell swung open."

"Dat gotta be all kinds of useful," Remy said, appreciatively. "Just let me get mah coat, and we can get gone."

And he turned away from them to approach the old man, who was still snoring heavily on one of the bunks. Remy crouched beside him and reached out to shake him gently by the shoulder. "Listen here, Murphy, I just gotta have mah coat back now, I can't help it." The man named Murphy turned over at Remy's touch, his snores briefly giving over to grumbles, but didn't wake. Remy took the ratty old trench coat off the man and drew it around his own shoulders. "I want ya ta take good care of youself," he went on. "Mebbe I be seein' you round sometime." The other man slept on.

Remy straightened and began to turned back toward them, and it was then that the guard stepped into the room. He was juggling two breakfast trays as he came through the door, and for a long moment he didn't even see them. Then he glanced up as the door clicked shut behind him, and the trays clattered to the floor. 

A lot of things could have happened to him then, fatal or merely passivizing. Emma could have put him to sleep or given him a brain aneurism. Erik could have pinned him to the floor by the metal in his belt or turned his own gun or nightstick against him. Azazel might have dropped him within two seconds. Angel could have spit venom at him, and Janos might have driven him against the wall with a gust of wind. 

None of these things happened, because they were all busy looking at her. And she understood then that the rest of them knew as well as she did what it was that Erik expected of her next, though it would never be clear to her how they had come to know  had Erik told them himself, or had Emma simply been running her mouth? 

So Mystique left the others behind and had started toward the guard, but she felt their eyes on her back, watching. She was aware as she moved forward of the silence of footfalls, felts in the soles of her feet and in the muscles of her legs and in her body, but noiseless against the concrete floor, buried under the pounding of her heart in her ears. 

People were frightened by her appearance, and she understood that, though she had not yet learned how to use it to her greatest advantage. It startled them, knocked them off balance, invited panic, and that was the case now. The door was at the guard's back, but he did not seem to realize that he might go back out through it. He was heavily-built, dark-haired, and his eyes bulged as she approached him. 

_He looks like Platt,_ she thought. _Put him in a black suit instead of that uniform and he'd look just like Platt._ The idea came unbidden to her, and she entertained it for only a moment, but once it was there it swelled in importance, and refused to be put aside or dismissed. 

Mystique had closed half the distance between them before he reached for his gun, but perhaps her panic was worse, because she did not even thought to arm herself until she saw the guard moving to do so. And then her hands fumbled at random for one of the weapons holstered around her waist, where their weight was a presence nearly alien after so many months of wearing only her own skin, guised or not, and she had drawn the stiletto  she would never be sure why it was the stiletto she brought out, if there had been some sort of subconscious decision to do so or if it had only been a been the results of a stupid, blind grab  as he had raised the gun and pointed its black eye at her. 

She stopped then, astonished that she had screwed up everything so quickly and so completely, and everything else was quite forgotten as Mystique waited to die. 

And then the gun jumped out of the guard's hands, skittering across the floor back toward the others, and Mystique heard Erik say, "That's all the help you're going to get, Raven," and understood that he meant it.

And she'd started forward again, no longer pushed and pulled by the fear of failing Erik or of doing something which she could not take back, but driven on by the fear of her own mortality that looking down the barrel of that gun had inspired, and by the anger that accompanied that fear. 

So she'd lunged at the guard with the stiletto, just as he was pulling his nightstick free from belt, and he'd jerked it up and struck her across the back the hand with it. She barely felt the blow (though later her hand would swell so badly that she wouldn't be able to flex her fingers for days) but the stiletto flew from her hand. 

The guard raised the nightstick and brought it down again, aimed this time for her head, and Mystique twisted and dodged and came up behind him to catch his arm, and there was a sudden terrified intake of breath, perhaps a prelude to something else  to a shout or a scream or maybe bargaining or begging words  that would remain unfulfilled, and then she twisted his arm back behind his back as hard as she could, and something weak in his shoulder gave away with a crackle and a pop, freeing the arm to bend at an angle which ought not to have been possible, and he suddenly became dead weight in her grip. 

While all this had been happening her free hand had been working as though it were an independent entity. She found now that it had drawn the bowie knife and had brought it up, and that it was poised now against the unconscious guard's throat, beneath the slumped chin. 

And she looked down into the clear surface of the blade, and saw her own face there, reflected in the steel, and did not like what she saw when she saw herself; chest heaving, panting, yellow eyes glassy with rage, face twisted up into something vicious and cruel. Ugly, but not because of the blue or the scales or any other surface details. 

"I " she began, but did not know how to finish. She was suddenly terrified that she might begin to cry. "I " Can't. Don't want to. Won't. Which one, and did it even matter? Six of one, half a dozen of the other, and it all added up the same way. To the same thing. Failure. 

The limp body slid from her arm. Remy spoke then, redundant. "Dat's good, chere. Just ya let ol' Earl alone now. He ain't s' bad a fellow, you don't wanna hurt him no mo'." 

Mystique hardly heard him. She was watching Erik, watching his eyes, watching the way he was looking at her now, as he had looked at Charles before he'd left him on that beach in Cuba. Appraising, evaluating what she was worth to him. She understood that he had the capacity to write off completely someone who had disappointed him, understood as well that even if he had gone back to Charles  or, more likely, allowed Charles to come back to him  nothing about the assessment Erik had made in Cuba had changed since. In the end, he did not turn his back on her, as he had Charles, but she knew that she had devalued herself in his eyes, perhaps permanently. 

"It's time we left," he said, and so they did.


	23. Chapter 23

_"I could not get over two facts, both equally difficult for the imagination to grasp, and one was that I could have been murdered. But the other was that I had been ready to commit murder. I saw nothing very clearly but I did see this: that my life, my real life, was in danger, and not from anything other people might do but from the hatred I carried in my own heart." - James Baldwin_

_"Closing your eyes isn't going to change anything. Nothing's going to disappear just because you can't see what's going on. In fact, things will even be worse the next time you open your eyes. That's the kind of world we live in. Keep your eyes wide open. Only a coward closes his eyes. Closing your eyes and plugging up your ears won't make time stand still." - Haruki Murakami_

* * *

So they returned to the Headquarters with the new Mutant, and when they had gotten there Mystique found that she was unable to look at any of the others, frightened of what she might find on their faces and in their eyes, and also of what they might see in hers. 

"How are you?" Erik said to her, and then she did look up, staring at him gape-mouthed. _How the hell am I supposed to answer that?_ she wondered, and was confused by the sudden surge of anger she felt. "Your hand," he added, as though in clarification. "Does it feel as though anything's broken?" 

It was only then that she really became consciously aware of the fact that her hand hurt horribly. The guard  _Earl. Fuck._  had gotten her good across the backs of her fingers with his nightstick, and they were already beginning to swell, but up until now there hadn't been time to stop and consider the pain. Or to consider anything else, for that matter. 

Now that they were safely back home, it seemed to her that it was time that she needed now, time and quiet to think thorough what had almost happened to her and what she had come within a heartbeat of doing. Mystique thought that she should excuse herself, that she should go up to her room and get her thought in order, do whatever she needed to do to feel as though she was back in control of herself. Cry maybe, though surprisingly she didn't feel nearly as much like crying as she might have expected.   _I need to be alone,_ she thought. _That's all. If I could just be alone for a little while I could get my shit back together._ And at the time, she really did believe it would be as easy as that, that everything would come clear if she just sat down and thought it through. 

But she didn't just leave. Instead, she demanded, "Oh, who really gives a shit?" and thought of the guard, of the crackling she had felt under her fingers and heard with her ears when she'd twisted his arm around, the way he had gasped when the joint had given way. She wondered how long he would stay blacked out, if someone would find him before he woke up and found himself alone and in pain. There was the drunk in the cell, but that man was so blotto had he seemed capable of sleeping through anything, and in any case she found now that she could not remember if Erik had closed the cell door behind Remy. What did her sore hand matter when she'd hurt him that bad? 

_You're being awful mawkish over a man you were supposed to kill,_ Emma's voice said inside her head. _If you really wanted to fix this with Erik, you'd have Azazel take you back to the jail and finish doing what you were meant to do. Azazel wouldn't mind taking you, and he wouldn't care if you cut that man's throat like a pig's, whether he's woken up by now or not. You could do it right in front of him, and he wouldn't think the first thing of it _

 _Stop it,_ Mystique thought. 

_I won't. I told you that you didn't want to be here, didn't I? From the first I told you that you ought to go back home. And now you've gotten you've gotten yourself in one hell of a bind, and you're only starting to see that, aren't you? So what are you going _

"Leave me alone, Emma," Mystique said out loud, but the seed had been planted, and she turned quickly to look at Azazel, and saw that the impassive look was back on his face. It was the same lack of expression with which he had studied Shaw's body, when Erik had shown it to them, the same closed-down look with which he had met Janos's outrage after he and Emma had brought Janos and Angel back to the Headquarters. She remembered now how she had concluded that Azazel could not have understood Spanish, because he'd shown such an absence of response to whatever it was that Janos had said, but she realized now that she must have been wrong about that, that Azazel himself had told her that he was fluent. 

Azazel was looking back at her now, with icy blue eyes that watched everything carefully but that did not react. He stood ram-rod straight beside Erik, stiff as a soldier with his hands clasped behind his back, chin tilted slightly upwards, and there was nothing that she could read on his face. 

Later, she would come to understand this stance for what it was; something akin to panic, a sort of emotional withdraw in the face of a type of situation which he had never known before Emma and then Shaw and Erik and herself, one in which neither fight nor flight was a valid reaction. She had begun to notice already, and this would become even clearer over the coming years, that when these two options were not available to him Azazel often had trouble knowing what else to do. He would fall back then on formalities and rules of etiquette, seeking out almost anxiously the "correct" way or doing a thing or handling a social interaction. When he was not sure of what to do, very often he would simply do nothing at all. 

But at the time she understood very little of this, and took it all for cruelty. 

Erik acted as though she hadn't spoken. "Azazel and I will make this next trip alone," he said to them all, and then to her he said, "You'll help our new brother get settled in, won't you, Raven?" he said, and she saw then how things would be from now on, how different from what she had begun to expect. It was almost a relief  almost. 

"Yeah. Okay, Erik," she said. 

"Good," he said, and then the pair of them had left without her. _And that's how it's going to be,_ she thought as the black and red smoke dissipated. _He'll leave me back._

"Jesus, is that really what you want to being whining about right now?" Emma said, and the shake of her head was as much tired as it was annoyed. "Everything that's ever happened isn't just about you, you know. You can bet he's pissed, but this doesn't have anything to do with that." Mystique opened her mouth to say something back, but before she could even just her thoughts in order Emma said, "I don't care. Just do what you're told and get the hick cleaned up. He smells." 

And Mystique watched Emma walk away, and wondered how much of what she had said had been the truth and how much had been lies, and wondered too if Emma was right about that last part, if she was being somehow selfish. 

"She always tawk like she better'n da rest'a da world?" Remy said, looking down at his hands. 

"Yes, actually," Angel said. "But never mind about her. "Look, Raven  so what if Erik's mad? Let him be. It was bullshit that he even wanted you to do that. Sure, if you'd had to that would have been something different  but not like that. He shouldn't have asked you to do something like that. It's not right." 

Mystique was pretty sure she agreed; that was what made her so angry to hear it. "That's easy for you to say, isn't it? He doesn't expect as much from you."

Angel's eyes narrowed. "Right," she said. "I'm done. There's no point in talking to you right now."

Angel left as well, Janos following her. He paused in the doorway to look back at Mystique, seemed like he wanted to say something, but he kept his silence and continued after Angel. 

And that left just Remy and herself, so Mystique turned toward him. "Ya'll're sorta rough w' eachudder, ain't ya?" he said, when he saw she was looking. 

"No," she said, the denial coming far too quickly to be believed. "It's not like that at all," she insisted, and knew that she was making it sound exactly as though it was. She went on, trying to make it better, trying to convince herself, and said, "We don't normally argue like this, and  and I shouldn't have snapped at Angel like that. I'll tell her I'm sorry later. But normally we all get along very well." And if that was a lie, she was not at the time conscious of it. "I mean, not Emma but... you know." 

Remy shook his head like a dog with a flea in its ear and looked at her sideways. His eyes were mostly hidden behind that curtain of limp hair, but she could tell that he didn't know, or rather that he didn't believe. 

"Look," she said. "It's mostly just that we've all been under a lot of pressure lately." 

"I guess dat must be true," Remy said. "But what I don't get is how come? What ya'll doin' here, 'r what? What is ya'll about, and what's dat got t' do w' old Gambit?" 

"Gambit?" 

"Aw, don't mind dat. It's just somethin' I call mahself sometimes." 

That made her smile. "I like it," she said, and then she started at the beginning, explaining mutations to Remy the way that Charles had explained it to her. She didn't really understand a lot of what she told him  not the way Charles understood it  but Remy listened hard and seemed to accept what she was telling him. From there, it was hard to know where to go next  truthfully, she still didn't know exactly what Erik's long term plan was, why he'd brought they together here or just what they were being trained for, and sometimes she wondered if Erik knew himself. 

Easier instead to talk about their abilities, about the marvelous and splendid (funny, she thought, how talking about Charles's ideas brought to her mouth words which he had so often used himself) things that they could do. Mystique talked about the others, about the ones whom Remy hadn't seen demonstrate their abilities, about Angel's wings and Janos's whirlwinds, and about Sean and Alex and Hank back in New York. She dodged almost unconsciously the question of why the others weren't here with them now. She took on Remy's likeness  tidying it up just a little bit so he wouldn't feel many more self-conscious about the state he was in than he did already, because she didn't want him to think that he was being made fun of  and when he saw that he'd just about jumped out of his seat and then proceeded to nearly rolled out of the chair laughing. 

Remy drew a deck of cards from one of his trench coat's innumerable pockets, and with hands that moved with a grace that was nearly sublime he'd taken one of the cards between his thumb and forefinger, slipping the rest of the deck smoothly back into his pocket with his other hand. He paused a moment for effect, and then the card had become infused with a bright crimson light. Remy flipped the card into the air above their hands, and Mystique turned her eyes upwards quickly, following its course to see it explode with a crack and a fizzle, as though it were a small firework. Flurries of black ash descended down on them, and among the ashes a solid shape drifted, falling more slowly than the rest and still glowing with a faint red heat. 

"Catch it, chérie," Remy prompted. "It won't burn you."

So she held out her hand, and when the shape settled as gently as a feather onto her outreached palm she looked down at it and saw that it was a heart. "Ain't never showed that off to nobody," he said, and his voice was shy, almost embarrassed. "I used it ta get out of a bad spot, once or twice, but I ain't never shown it off just so someone else could see." 

Mystique glanced up at him briefly, saw the look in his eyes and understood at once what was happening. It seemed quite natural to her that a Mutant would be smitten by the first member of his or her own kind that he or she met  how could any individual who'd felt so alone for so long do otherwise? Nonetheless, it was nothing she wanted to encourage. She did return his smile, but at the same time she tipped the paper ash heart from her hand and onto the floor. It crumbled into bits when it fell, and she brought her hands together to brush the remnants of ash from her skin, and their conversation continued.   

Eventually the discussion had turned to the larger question of Mutants, and she had explained to him about how they were evolution's next step, how they were the future, and here Erik's ideas started to bleed together and merge with Charles's, until she was no longer sure which of the two had inspired her words. 

Up until this point Remy had listened intently, a hunger in those red-rimmed eyes that she knew only too well. But now he leaned forward in the chair he had taken across from her, his cunning hands clasped together and a faint crimson glow in his eyes. "I want ya ta know dat I'm all sorts of thankful dat you told me all dis, cause f'sure it all makes a lot'a sense. But what I don't get  what's makin' no sense ta me  is how come you went 'n hurt poor Earl like ya did? I beenlookin', but I can't work out no reason ta have done dat."

"I..." she started, struggling to maintain eye contact. It was not, exactly, accusation that was in his eyes; rather it seemed to her that there was an earnest and real desire to understand. Maybe that made it harder  How was she supposed to explain her actions to this man she barely knew, when she didn't even know her own mind? But she needed to say something, so she began tentatively, "Erik says we need to be able to fight " 

"Uh-huh," Remy said, with a little bow of his head that said she'd just told him what he'd expected to hear. He didn't lift his head, but cocked it sideways, looking up at her with earnest gravity. "Look here, chérie  you just listen hard to old Gambit now. You ain't the first t' be forced t' do somethin' you ain't wanna do by a bad man. Dis Erik, he ain't no good for you  to ya  'n I can tell dat much already. So I be thinkin' "

"No, no, no," she said. "Stop right there. You're getting everything twisted around. Erik hasn't 'forced' me to do anything. And he's not " She paused. He was watching her funny, like he thought she was lying to him and that made him sad. _He's a nice guy,_ she thought again, and that made her sad for him; maybe Emma was right, and she had gotten herself in over her head, but she wasn't nearly as bad off as a nice guy like Remy was bound to be wherever he went. "You don't understand the situation," she said finally. 

"I guess mabbe I don't," he allowed, but his tone was dubious. 

Then she found herself talking about Cuba, but only in the vaguest and most abbreviated terms. The lesson that was to be drawn from that day had seemed very clear to her, but now when she tried to explain it properly she found that several stubborn facts got in the way, not the least of which was that most of the Brotherhood had been on the wrong side.

"We literally saved the world," she told him, and didn't mention who that 'we' did and did not include. "We saved millions  maybe billions  of lives, and do you know how the Americans and the Soviets responded, when three minutes before that they'd been ready to bomb each other into a nuclear hell? They worked together to try to wipe us off the earth. They couldn't agree about anything else, not even for the sake of the entire human race, but they agreed that it was in the best interests of both sides to kill us off." She tried to describe how frightening it had been to watch the missiles coming, the shock and hurt of the betrayal, but found that all she could express was rage. "They hate us, Remy. Even if we sacrifice ourselves for them," she said, thinking of Charles, "they still hate us. As soon as they find out that we exist, they hate us, and they're all going to know soon. They'll want to kill us. We have to understand that, Remy. And we have to be ready for that." 

   "Yea, okay, mabbe all dat is true  I ain't agreeing dat it is, not necessarily, but might be it is," Remy said slowly, like he was mulling it over as he went. "But, chérie... old Earl didn't never shot no rockets at anybody."

"He didn't have to," she said, and Remy made a small, inarticulate sound of dissent. "Let me ask you a question  if you showed him your ability, what do you think he'd say? What do you think he'd do?" 

Remy didn't answer at first. "Nothin' nice," he mumbled at last, unwillingly. 

"And if me or Azazel walked up to him on the street, what would you say he'd do? Do you think  he'd be friendly toward us 'r what?" she said, being to pick up on his dialect, the drawling cadence of the words, almost subconsciously. 

"No... he wouldn't've been friendly," Remy said, and his hand went up to scratch behind the back of his ear nervously. "Ta tell ya the truth, he don't even really like Negroes much." 

"So that's how it is."  

"Yea, but..." Remy began, frowning hard. "You saying all dis, and mabbe a lot'a it's true even... but I don't ya can really mean it. If you did, how come ya didn't just go ahead and kill him, then?" 

"I don't know," Mystique said. "But it had more to do with me than it did with him." She realized this only as she said it, and it made her feel slightly better, if only for the time being. 

"I seen how you looked when you grabbed him. I was watchin' ya. You wanted to, but den ya just didn't want t' anymore." Mystique shrugged; there was nothing she could think to say to that. "I guess dat ya can be pretty scary when ya wanna be 'r when ya think you gotta be, but you ain't all dat  bad." She shrugged again. 

"So what happened to all dem missiles, 'r what?" Remy asked.

She hesitated. "Erik dropped them into the ocean," she said. It wasn't really a lie  not exactly.  

And then, with a sound like the boom of distant thunder, Azazel returned with Erik and the next group of Mutants.


	24. Chapter 24

_"One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one's own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad... One is always in the position of having to decide between amputation and gangrene. Amputation is swift but time may prove that amputation was not necessary  or one may delay amputation too log. Gangrene is slow, but it is impossible to be sure that one is reading one's symptoms right. The idea of going through life a cripple is more than one can bear, and equally unbearable is the risk of swelling up slowly, in agony, with poison. And the trouble, finally, is that the risks are real even if the choices do not exist." - James Baldwin_

* * *

Shaw's mistakes  his errors in judgment, his blind, bloody egoistical fuck ups  were, in Erik Lehnsherr's estimation, legion, but he had made two mistakes that dwarfed all the others, and these two were interrelated. The first was that Shaw had been a truly miserable teacher, and that was something that could be understood as a character flaw. The second was that he'd given Erik a powerful and completely valid reason to hate him and to want to destroy him, and in the final tally _that_ little mistake boiled down to a tactical error. 

The extent to which Shaw's educational methods had derailed the development of Erik's mutant ability was something that had only become clear to him after he met Charles. Before then, he had almost forgotten how easy it had been, when he was small and his ability had only just begun to manifest, for him to move small metal objects  nails, silverware, and yes, coins  across the surface of the kitchen table. Erik couldn't always do this  sometimes it didn't work, especially if he was tired or very hungry  but most of the time he could, and sometimes he could move bigger things, too, and even make them float. 

It was strange that he could make objects move without touching them, and he understood that as well as his mother did, though the idea that it was strange had not come to him through her. She had asked Erik not to show anyone else was he could do, that was true, but this had simply been out of concern for his own safety. His mother had loved him more than her own life, after all, and everything she did had been aimed toward keeping him safe. 

Erik understood very well that he'd been lucky in that. Nearly every Mutant he would encounter over the next four decades would have his or her own story of parental rejection, every tale different in the details but at its heart the same. When the people who were meant to love a child best turned or him or her with hatred or disgust or violence it left deep and lasting wounds, but that was one set of scars that Erik had been fortunate enough to never acquire. His mother had never made him feel as though his mutation was a bad thing. He'd had the most success in moving objects when he was showing her what he could do. 

How impossible it had been, on the other hand, to make one little 5 Reichsmark coin move when he was under the eye of a man which Erik had understood from the beginning only wanted to hurt him. 

Shaw had claimed from the first that he wasn't really a Nazi, but Erik had never believed that. Erik had little doubt that Shaw primary goal had been to simply used the Nazis to his own ends  that there had been no personal commitment to the party was clear, as he'd been happy enough to jump ship when it became obvious that it was finally sinking  but Erik understood very well that you couldn't be as deeply seeped in that type of ideology has Shaw had been without being influenced by it. Shaw might have dismissed and mocked the Nazis, might have claimed to see their race ideology for the absurdity that it was, but his own ideas were hardly all that different; he simply applied a more stringently exclusive criteria for who was and was not worthy of life. 

And it was telling, wasn't it, that it had been Darwin who Shaw had killed after they'd moved against him, and not Alex. 

In any case, if Shaw's real intentions had been to unlock Erik's power  and Erik did not doubt that this was what Shaw had wanted  then he'd gone about it in the most backward way imaginable. He had been selfish and impatient, too greedy to see immediately another demonstration of Erik's ability after the gate incident. Perhaps, Erik thought now, a strange and disquieting thought, Shaw had simply wanted very badly some confirmation that he wasn't the only one who was different  most Mutants, after all, longed for such a thing. 

Well, Shaw had gotten his demonstration  Shaw almost always got what Shaw wanted. Erik had moved metal after Shaw shot his mother, yes, and in a most dramatic fashion, but after that he had not again achieved anything that specular, not while under Shaw's care.  

Shaw had believed that it was pain and rage that brought out Erik's ability, but he was only half right. The rage was good  Erik by no means rejected rage as a motivator, and even Charles acknowledged its usefulness. But pain, and all the fear and self-hatred and guilt that came with it, did nothing for him, not in the long term anyway. Charles had helped him cut through this pain and transform it into something more detached and calculating (Charles called this 'serenity' but Erik doubted strongly that this was the correct word). In only a few sessions Charles had shown him how to unlock more of his power than Shaw had ever been able to draw out, even more than Erik had been able to harness on his own over the course of a decade's practice, and for that Erik was duly grateful. 

Erik wondered where he might be now if not for the war and the KZ and for Shaw, what he might have accomplished by now if he'd had better teachers and a stable environment in which to learn when he was young. How much of his ability had been stunted and squandered away? He imagines that, if things had been different, he might reach his hands skyward and pluck from their orbit the satellites that the Americans and Soviets had grown so fond of launching, that he might draw the slumbering iron ore from the ground under his feet. But then, he might learn to do these things still.  

Erik might have given Shaw quite a lot if Shaw had applied different tactics  after all, he'd only been a kid, still young and stupid enough to want to please the adults around him, and he would have done anything in his power to keep his mother safe. But instead, Shaw had chosen to set the stakes impossibly high when he'd pointed the gun at Erik's mother, had all but primed him for failure. Shaw's own mistake, and one Erik saw that he paid for. 

Now Erik is badly worried that he's made a similar error with Raven. He's pressed her further than she was ready or willing to do, and so, he suspects, damaged her. Damaged himself in her eyes as well, no doubt. 

There is much of Shaw in him, and Erik knows this and fights it when he can, and tried to use it to the benefit of himself and his people when he needs to. Emma, he's since learned, had thought as much when she decided to join them, and had expected that he would pick up where Shaw had left off. It was as much a desire to avoid doing so as his own uncertainty that made him hesitate to take command of the Brotherhood once he'd brought them together. That had been a mistake  the number of his mistakes seemed likely to equal Shaw's soon, the way things were going  and he had attempted to correct for this error, to take control of the situation. The most important thing for right now, he had decided, was organization and discipline; the others should not be allowed to coast along, but should be doing everything they could to prepare themselves for the coming war. 

But with Raven he's bent the stick too far in the other direction. He had seen his error in the instant that she dropped the knife and backed away from the limp form of the guard, but by then it had been too late to correct his mistake. 

Emma has insisted more than once that there is great  even terrible  potential in Raven. "She's nothing," Emma has told him, "and at the same time she's everything all at once. There is nothing that she is not capable of being or doing if given the right set of circumstances. That should frighten you, bu the way. I know it doesn't, but it should."

When Emma said things like that it was hard to know if she was telling the truth or not (or even if she had interpreted the situation correctly) but the way Emma picked at Raven left Erik inclined to believe that Emma was telling the truth, at least as she saw it. Emma, after all, had her own methods of dealing with her own insecurities, which were as legion as Shaw's mistakes. 

Erik had intended to bring some of that potential out  Raven would need it, and probably sooner rather than later  but something had gone wrong. She had been an instant away from going through with it, but at the last moment she'd stepped back from the edge. That this was his own fault, Erik had no doubt; he'd chosen a poor target for her, that was all, and so she'd had difficulty justifying it. 

He's worried that she'll begin to resent him now, to react against him as she reacts against Charles. In some ways Raven doesn't have the foggiest idea of who she is or what she wants to be, but at the same time she knows the answers to these questions with an absolute certainty. She is changeable, indefinite and undefined, and Erik believes this to be a manifestation of her mutation and thus beautiful, but it makes it difficult to know know how to handle her, and after all he's had so little experience in handling others. Or handling them gently, in any case.

It had not, somehow, ever crossed his mind that she would react quite so badly to the task he had set her. This is a sign, he must suppose, of his own damaged nature. He had intended to do better than this. 

But by the time he and Azazel would return with the with the new Mutants later that night, Raven would had reached her own conclusions about what her failure to kill that guard meant. 

Azazel took them to the door of the first Mutant's trailer. There was some risk in this, because they might have been spotted from the carnival's midway, but in this case good manners seemed more important that stealth. And in any case, it seemed a safe bet that not even Azazel would attract too much attention at a freak show; if anyone did happen to see them, they were likely to imagine that Azazel was only dressed up for a role in some act. 

It was a prodigious trailer, and the young man who answered Erik's knock on the door was equally prodigious. A sandy-haired, baby-faced individual, he stood no less than three meters tall and was at least that wide around. The giant Mutant frown down at Erik. "Yeah, what'da you want " he started to say, but then he caught sight of Azazel. His frown turned from annoyed to serious. "Am I dead?" he asked gravely. 

"Not as far as I'm aware..." Erik began. 

"I'm asking," the other man went on, speaking slowly but determined to have his piece, "because I think I see the Devil behind you." 

"Comrade," Azazel said from behind Erik, matching the big man's slow gravity, "I am not the Devil."

The other Mutant turned his eyes on Erik. "Is he the Devil?" he demanded. 

"No," Erik said definitively.

"Sounds Russian. Is he some kind of communist?" 

Erik turned to look at Azazel. "I am forever bored with this question," Azazel said.      

Erik turned back to the big man. "No," he said.     

"Okay, I guess you can come in then," the Mutant said, and stepped away from the door to let them inside. The trailer swayed on its shocks when he moved. 

"Erik Lehnsherr," Erik said once they'd come inside. He held his hand out, and when the other Mutant bent over to take it Erik's hand was swallowed completely by his, disappearing half-way up to the elbow in the man's grasp. His grip was alarmingly powerful. 

"Fred," the Mutant said. "Well, Frederick. Frederick Dukes." 

"Azazel," Azazel said. 

"Is that your real name or a made-up one?" Fred asked Azazel. 

"It's mine," Azazel said with a shrug, and Erik wondered if he had understood the question. 

"I got a made-up name," Fred went on. "Hangs up in lights above the stage when I'm preforming. Says, 'The Blob.' I don't like it that much, to tell the truth." He paused. "Fits, though.

"What'd you guys want, anyway?"

"I'll get to that in a moment," Erik promised. "But first off, it's my understanding that there are two other Mutants at this... circus?" This was not actually a circus, and Erik knew that, but he did not believe he could say the words "freak show" and keep the distaste from his voice. 

"Mutants?" Fred repeated dubiously, and Erik explained that they were looking for people who possessed extraordinary abilities or physical traits. Fred listened to him seriously, frowning hard as he thought about what Erik was saying, and at last he broke in to say, "Oh, you mean the real freaks, not the ones who are just pretending."

"Something like that yes," Erik said, trying not to grit his teeth. Over the years, he could encounter dozens of different theories invented by isolated individuals or groups of Mutants to explain just what they were and where they had come from, many of which he found fascinating, if backwards. But from all these origin stories, the most commonly recurring one was also the most insulting; the idea that Mutants were simply freakishly deformed humans. _He's explaining what he is with the tools he has to understand it,_ Erik thought. _I should not take it personally._ Nonetheless, he did. 

"Okay, but there's four of us, not just three. There's me and Luke and Matthew and the kid. You don't want to go and confuse Luke and Matthew for one person, I'll tell you that right now. They've only got one set of lungs between them, but they can sure shout loud if they decide they want to chew you out."

"The kid...?" Erik repeated. He had expected Siamese twins  through Cerebro Charles had gotten a good look at the Mutants, and he'd given Erik a brief description of the individuals he was looking for  but Charles had said nothing about a child.

"The kid," Fred repeated. "Todd. The Boss is billing him as a lizard-boy, but I think he's more of a froggy little thing." 

"May we see him?" Erik said, and Fred shrugged and lead them down the hall.

Erik had expected to find a bedroom behind the door that Fred opened, but it was actually the bathroom. "Shhh," Fred said. "I think he's sleeping," and when Fred stepped into the room and crouched down to open the door to the cabinet under the sink Azazel and Erik shared a puzzled glance. "I told him more than once that he could sleep on the couch," Fred was saying, almost nervously, "but he likes it better in here, I guess." He straightened and stepped back so the others could look inside the cabinet. 

At first glance Erik took the boy sleeping in the cupboard to be no older than three years of age, though later he would conclude that Todd was probably closer to five, but was smaller than would have been average for a human boy of the same age. He was curled up among the pipes in a heavy blanket, his over-sized and muddy bare feet sticking out from under the covers. The boy's toes, Erik noted, were webbed. The child was painfully skinny, and there was a greenish caste to his skin, though whether that was an aspect of his mutation or a sign of illness or simply grim Erik couldn't say. His back seemed to be hunched, but maybe that was only the way he was laying. 

"I know he looks like he ain't been taken care of," Fred was saying, "but I've been doing my damnest. You got to fight him just to get him to take a bath, and it isn't ten minutes later before he's all dirty again. Never knew a kid who liked the mud that much..." 

"I am confused," Azazel said. "Is this your son?"

"No," Fred said quickly. "Nothing like that. The Boss  the guy who owns the show, I mean  just got him the other day, and I've sort of been looking after him, is all." 

"Got him," Erik repeated. "You mean he was hired," he said, knowing very well already that this was not what Fred meant. 

Fred's brow furrowed, but he shepherded them out of the bathroom before he answered. "Not exactly..." he said, closing the door softly behind them. "I mean, I don't know, but... but I sort of got the idea that maybe the Boss sort of... took him off his parents' hands."

"For money," Erik prompted. 

"I think so, yeah," Fred said, and there was a sudden flair of anger in his eyes and on his face. "His parents sure as hell weren't taking any kind of care of him. Look at how thin he is  he ain't been eating right, maybe not ever, at it ain't cause he's a picky eater, either. He swallowed a goddamned paper plate the other day, didn't even chew it more than once or twice. And I'll tell you something else, too  he doesn't even know how to hold a spoon, didn't even seem to know what it was for when I showed it to him." The anger disappeared as quickly as it had come, to be replaced by worry. "That's not normal for a kid that big, right? Kid that big should already know how to eat right, right?" 

"I'm not sure I'm following all this correctly," Azazel said to Erik in Russian, his voice low. "Did Frederick just say that the boy's parents sold him?"

"That's what I heard," Erik agreed in the same language. 

"I'd be very happy to kill them, and the buyer as well."

"We can talk about that later," Erik said. 

Fred was staring at them, and the stormy look was back on his face. "You talking about me?" 

"My apologies," Azazel said, in a voice that was surprisingly soothing. "My English is very limited."

"Sounds fine to me," Fred said. "I heard my name." When no one said anything to that, Fred went on as though his suspicions had been confirmed, his voice rising. "You two can just go to hell. I'm going the goddamned best that I can with this kid, but he's scared shitless of everything and doesn't have no idea where he is or why, and anyhow, how am I expected to know anything about taking care of kids "

"If you keep shouting, you will wake him," Azazel warned. His voice was even, but Erik could see the way his tail was lashing; Azazel was no accustomed to standing around to be yelled at. "You do very well to take him, but there is no woman who would give you help with boy?" 

Fred shook his head. "No... I mean, one of the concessions girls offered to look after him, but she didn't really want to, you know? She thought he was gross. All the norms do. And... I guess I sort of thought that the kid oughta stay with me and Luke and Matthew... Because he's sort of like us, you know? That's not stupid, is it?" 

"No, not stupid," Azazel said. 

"But it makes sense, right?"

"Perfect sense," Erik agreed. 

Fred went on fretfully, "I just didn't figure that taking care of a kid would be this hard. Luke and Matthew said they'd help, but they're almost still kids themselves, and " There was a sound of a door opening and closing on the other side of the trailer. "Speak of the devil," Fred said. 

"Hey, Fred!" a voice called from the front of the trailer, "We got popcorn and booze!" and a second voice added, "Fuel of champions!"  

"Shut up, you stupid idiots!" Fred answered. "The kid's sleeping, don't you have any goddamned brains between the two of you?!" By this point, Erik was pretty sure the boy was either awake or dead, but no noise came from behind the closed bathroom door. 

They followed Fred back out into the front room, and here Erik had gotten his first glimpse of the twins. Luke and Matthew  Erik was not sure which was which  were olive-skinned boys with short-crop black hair. He judged them to be about seventeen or eighteen, a few years younger than Fred. They shared one body between themselves, and the individual on the left had an extra arm. Their skulls were fused at the temple and all the way down the the top of their ears, at such an angle that one was always looking in a different direction from the other. A faint blue glow emanated from the left side of their chest, where the heart was. 

When they saw Azazel, the Mutant on the right said, "Jesus Christ!" A horrified expression spread across his features, and he'd dropped the gallon-sized tub of popcorn he'd been carrying. The Mutant on the other side just said, "Hmm," and looked interested.  

"Calm the hell down, Matt," Fred said. "He's not the Devil, I already asked about that. He's just family."

"Family," Azazel repeated in a voice that couldn't be read, watching the nervous Mutant watch him. 

"Another freak, is what I meant," Fred said, blushing furiously. "I mean  a Mutant.

"You understand that?" Fred said to Matthew. "He's another Mutant, that's my point. Just like the rest of us."

"Okay," the one on the left agreed  he would be Luke, Erik inferred. "But what's a Mutant?"  

And then all three of them had turned to Erik for an answer. 

It took a demonstration of his ability and less than ten minutes discussion to convince Fred and Luke to come along. As Erik gained experience in recruiting, he would find that ninety percent of the time if a new Mutant was going to agree to join the Brotherhood he or she would agree to do so within half an hour. If they were not immediately interested that almost always meant that they wouldn't be convinced. 

Matthew was the hold out, and before very long it became clear that his sticking point was Azazel, though at first he was unwilling to admit this. "I mean... It's just..." he started several times, before finally taking the plunge. "Look  why does he look like that? That's what I don't get. If you're telling the truth, if 'Mutants' can look like almost anything, then why's he look like _that_? I mean, what's the chance of someone just _randomly_ happening to look that much like a demon?"

"It's not entirely random," Erik said, wishing now that he had listened more closely when Charles had waxed professorial about the process of mutation. But then, biology had never been his strong-suit. When he had been in his senior cycle of secondary school, he had considered briefly pursuing a degree in engineering  he had the marks for it, and it seemed like a natural choice given his ability  but there had been more pressing matters to deal with.  

"But still," Matthew insisted. 

Erik had looked to Azazel, not wishing to speak for him, but Azazel had held his silence. "Some  Mutations are reoccurring," Erik said. "For example, I know of two telepaths, and there are probably more out there. Blue skin or hair also seems to be fairly common."

"Telepaths," Luke repeated, a grin splitting his face. "Blue. This is all so cool."

"I know it is," Erik agreed, and found himself returning the smile with all his teeth. He turned back to Matthew and continued seriously, "So if he looks similar to artistic representations of the devil or demons for whatever, that's probably because in the past there has been an individual or individuals with similar mutations, who were for whatever reason  probably human hysteria  taken to be demons." 

"Yeah, but if that's true why is his name is Azazel?" Matthew asked, in a tone that clearly said that he had Erik trapped now. 

"That is joke," Azazel said flatly, his arms crossed over his chest. "Hah." 

Matthew began to argue, but Fred had cut in. "Goddammit, why don't you just drop it?" he demanded. "Why do you and Luke look the way you do? Why does the kid look the way he does? Why do I? We just do, that's all. That's all there is to it. You don't need to go picking on folks for how they look."

"I'm not picking on him," Matthew said. 

"You are too. They came all the way here just to talk to us, and now you're making fun of him for the way he looks." 

"Just because you always think people are making fun you, Fred, doesn't mean that I'm doing that to..." Matthew started to say, but then he trailed off, seeming to think better of what he'd already said, never mind what else he might have wanted to add.  

Fred had gone redder than ever  whether from embarrassment or anger, Erik couldn't say. Most likely both. "You want me to kick your ass for you?" Fred demanded.

"Please don't," Luke said. 

Fred snorted, his nostrils flaring. "Well, I won't," he allowed. "But only because you're attached to the same ass, Luke. But your brother better just shut his stupid mouth, is all."

"I just want to make sure we aren't running off somewhere with Satan," Matthew said. "I don't think I'm being that unreasonable." 

"You're being stupid, is what you're being. I don't even know why you believe that junk," Luke said. 

"I don't know, Luke. I guess I was just raised right," Matthew said. "Unlike some people I could name, _Luke_."   

And Luke said to Matthew, "I sincerely hope you understand why what you just said didn't make one goddamned bit of sense." To Azazel he said, "I'm sorry about my brother. He can be a real idiot sometimes, but it's only because he didn't get his fair share of our brains." 

Azazel didn't answer, only lifted his chin slightly in acknowledgment. Erik hadn't the slightest idea what he might be thinking; nothing showed on his face.  

To Erik Luke said, "We'll go."

"Me too," Fred added quickly. "And the kid, course." 

"Wait a minute, I haven't agreed to anything," Matthew said, but after another half hour's worth of arguments, mostly between Luke and himself, he consented to go along, if not happily. The two of them left for their own trailer to pack their bags, and Fred had gone to his bedroom to do the same. 

"Well, that was all very interesting," Erik said dryly, but Azazel didn't answer. Erik wondered again what was going through his head. 

A short while later, Azazel had teleported the six of them back to the common room of the Chicago headquarters, which turned out to be empty except for Remy and Raven, and Raven had taken charge of settling the newcomers in without being asked. Without, in fact, speaking to Erik at all.


	25. Chapter 25

_"It was the Lord that knew the impossibility every parent in that room faced: how to prepare the child for the day when the child would be despised and how to create in the child  by what means?  a stronger antidote to this poison than one had found for oneself... which also raised the question of whether or not such an antidote existed; raising, which was worse, the question of whether or not such an antidote was desirable; perhaps poison should be fought with poison." - James Baldwin_

_"Being told you are a worthless piece of shit and not believing it is a form of resistance." - Kathleen Hanna_

* * *

It was late by the time Erik and Azazel returned with the new Mutants. There were four of them; a huge man named Fred, a pair of Siamese twins called Luke and Matthew, and a weedy little boy with a greenish-gray complexion whom Fred introduced as Todd. When prompted to say hello Todd only looked at her with slightly buggy eyes which were about three sizes too big for his face. He didn't speak. 

"Heavy work," Azazel whispered confidentially into her ear, and Mystique understood then at least part of the reason why he and Erik had gone alone. Azazel could transport people more easily than inanimate objects, but he did have limitations and taking too many trips or transporting too much weight could wear him out. 

Erik and Azazel disappeared upstairs almost as soon as they arrived, muttering conspiratorially with each other in low voices. She was able to catch just enough to know that they weren't using English, but nothing else. Mystique wondered what it was they were hiding, and from whom. 

That left her alone to settle the five  counting Remy  newcomers in for the night. This shouldn't have been an especially difficult task  several spare rooms had already been prepared  but when she'd paused to check in on Todd for one last time before going to bed herself, she'd found that he had disappeared. 

So she'd gone back to Fred's room to enlist his help in finding the boy. It was only after an hour's fruitless search (during which time she came very close to going to ask Azazel for help, but did not out of fear of interrupting whatever he and Erik were up to) that Fred located the boy on the top shelf of a third floor linen closet, just outside the reach of his blunt fingertips. 

It took another half hour to get him down. Fred tried in quick secession reasoning and pleading and yelling, all to no effect. The boy simply watched them with those big, still eyes, and remained crouched just out of reach. They also tried bribery, but when Fred held up a cookie to show it to Todd the boy's tongue lashed out, as quick and long as a whip, and snatched it from Fred's hand, drawing the entire thing into his mouth and seeming to swallow it without chewing. 

Finally, Mystique simply told Fred to lift her up so she could pluck the boy from the shelf herself, and he'd hesitated but did as she instructed. The grip of his huge square hands around her waist was surprisingly and painfully strong. She glanced down to tell him to loosen up, and saw that he was blushing a furiously embarrassed beet-red. Mystique opted for silence.  

In any case, they got the kid down that way, but not easily. Todd was like a frightened animal, cowering crouched in the shelf's corner while she spoke softly to him, trying to convince him not to be scared. "It's okay," she said, making things up as she went along  she could not remember the last time she had spoken to a child and wasn't at all sure that she was saying the right things. "I know it's scary to be in a new place with all these new people, but no one here is going to hurt you. It's all okay."

He didn't respond, and finally she'd simply reached out to pick him up. He'd gone wild, kicking and clawing and bucking to get away. She'd pulled the boy toward her as gently as she could, and he'd landed one hell of a good strong kick to her nose before going as still as a rabbit in a snare, a shivery and clammy-skinned bundle of taunt sinews and pointed bone. 

They'd put him back to bed, though Mystique didn't have much faith that he would stay there, and Todd watched her every movement with those huge mossy green eyes that never seemed to blink. She was beginning to wonder if he was capable of speech. 

When she and Fred were on the other side of the bedroom door, she asked him, "Do you know what happened to him?" 

Fred shrugged. "Same type of things that happened to all of us, I guess," he said. It was remarkable, Mystique thought, how quickly Fred latched onto that _us_ , the idea of a collective Mutant identity; he said the word shyly yet with great ferocity. "I didn't want to worry him with too many questions right off  maybe it's better if he don't think about it more than he needs to, you know?" Mystique thought of all the blank and black spaces in her own childhood, and knew that she would never take up Emma up on her offer to retrieve those memories. To Fred, she nodded. 

"Other thing is," Fred went on, "he don't talk so good, so sometimes I can't understand what the hell he's even trying to tell him. He's sort of got a lisp or something, I don't know the right word for it. You saw that tongue of his, I guess it must make it harder to talk right in the first place, and I don't think anyone's been trying to teach him anything anyway.

"It's good you guys found us. I've been trying  like I told those other guys, Erik and Azazel, right?  me and Matthew and Luke have been trying to look after him, but we aren't doing so good, you know? I don't even know how to teach him the normal stuff, never mind about being a Mutant and all that, and he's so scared of everything. Someone's been hurting him  anyone can tell that  and..." he trailed off.

"No one else is going to hurt him," Mystique said, wanting to make it true even if she didn't believe it, wanting it to be true for the sake of her own lost child-self, and for the sake of the dead Mutant child they'd found in Argentina, and for all the other Mutants out there  young and grown  that they couldn't help today but might yet someday. When she was honest with herself, she would know that she never really _liked_ Todd, but she would put a tremendous amount of her hopes and ambitions into bringing that kid up right. "And when he's big enough, we'll teach him not to _let_ anyone else hurt him."   

"Good," he said. "That's the main thing, I think." 

There was something in his voice that made Mystique look up at Fred, nine feet tall and five hundred pounds at least, solid steel beneath the fat, all big heart and short fiery bursts of  bad temper, and she heard herself say, "Who hurt you, Fred?"  

His smile was evasive and strangely sad. "Aw hell," he said. "Nothing hurts the Blob."


	26. Chapter 26

_"Loneliness does not come from having no people about one, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to oneself, or from holding certain views which others find inadmissible." - Carl Gustav Jung_

_"The first lesson a revolutionary must learn is that he is a doomed man." - Huey P. Newton_

* * *

Mystique did not slept well that night. She was still awake when, two hours after she and Fred had finally gotten Todd back into bed, Azazel let himself into her room. She kept her eyes closed when she heard him come in, feigning sleep.

She listened to him undressing in the dark, the soft twin thunks of the heels of his shoes bumping against the wall as he lined them out neatly beside the dresser, then a heavier metallic thud as he laid something on the dresser's top. _His swords,_ she thought, mistakenly. _Why did he bring those in here?_ Other small and domestic noises followed as he moved about the room, the sound of the laundry hamper opening, the swish of heavy cloth falling into the container.

She could see him without opening her eyes, his every action deliberately ordered. All of this had by then become routine. He did things the same way every night.

A few moments later Azazel slid into the bed, spooning up against her, his bare chest against her back. His skin felt very warm. "Are you sleeping?" he whispered into her ear, his voice low and gravely.

Mystique focused on keeping her breathing slow and natural, and didn't answer. She was pretty sure that she could fool him his way, though she had never tried it before.

The guard was still heavy on her mind, but she knew that it would be pointless to try to discuss this with Azazel. Emma had right about at least one thing ( _and she might have been right about everything else,_ a voice said to her, but she forced herself to that troublesome little thought alone) and that was that there was no way Azazel would understand what was going through her head now (she did not, herself, understand it). Really, he would have no earthly idea of why she was even upset. Were she to raise the question he would only be puzzled by her guilt and fears.

Azazel didn't feel such things, at least not in the context of humans he didn't know. He didn't worry about killing; he liked to do it. He thought it was fun. That was the truth, and she knew it, and she had promised herself from the beginning that she wouldn't lie to herself about it.

She wanted very badly to be able to ask Azazel to find out what had happened to the guard for her, to be given some reassurance that the man had been found and taken care of and was safe now. But then, she was pretty sure that Azazel had already been to see the guard. _That would explain the way he and Erik were whispering with each other, and why else would he have his swords out?_ The thought chilled her.

Azazel reached across her chest to take her hand in his own. It was an easy, familiar gesture  surprising, how quickly that familiarity had grown between them, especially considering how frightened of him she had been at first, or how he could sometimes scare her still. Barely three months had past since Cuba, yet so much had changed so quickly and would only continue to change.

Mystique remembered how it had their first time together had been, only a month before, how twisted up with hate she had felt when she'd gone to him, and how when she'd found him she had seen the same wounded rage on his face under the moonlight. How much better it had made her feel just to kiss him, how it had made her feel bold and brave and strong enough to bear the unbearable. How good it had been to draw from him that first shy bedroom smile, that first astonished hiss of pleasure, how it had made so much of the rest recede into the background, fading in importance if not actually disappearing.

Things were no longer as clear or as simple as they had been then. Now Azazel drew their hands up under her chin, and she thought that she could smell blood on his skin. That couldn't really be, she knew. No matter where he'd been for the last three hours or what he might have been doing during that time, there would be no blood on his hands now. His hands might have been calloused, but he always kept them immaculately clean.

The smell was only in her imagination, and things were hard enough already without any invention on her part. She needed to stop it now. _Find out the truth,_ she told herself, _and go from there._

Mystique stretched, curling her toes around his own as she did so, and yawned elaborately, as though she were only just coming awake. "Where've you been?" she asked, putting sleep in her voice.

"I found your blades," he said. "You had forgotten them, earlier."

"Did you?" she said, and lifted her head and squinting in the darkness to see what he had actually laid on the dresser's top; it was, in fact, her bowie knife and stiletto, and not his own swords.

"That's all you did?" she asked, and now she was afraid that her voice had betrayed her. _What do I care anyway?_ she asked herself angrily. _Who cares if Azazel did go back to kill him, he's just some ugly fat old backwoods racist hick, so what do I care?_ She tried to keep her voice drowsy-sounding. "You were gone for so long..."

"It was difficult to get into evidence locker without being noticed," he said. "There were many CIA agents there."

At this point it seemed to her that there was no longer any reason to pretend to be still half-asleep. Mystique sat up in bed quickly, reached for the bedside lamp and turned it on. "CIA?" she said.

He didn't sit up, but watched her closely from the bed, half-way propped up by one arm. "Yes. I imagine Remy's 'old Earl' has been talking to people about what he saw. They tend to do that, you know, when you leave them living." There was no admonishment in his voice when he said that; it was simply a statement of fact, as neutral in value as 'the sky is blue' or 'water is wet.'

She took from this that he had not hurt the guard, but she barely had time to feel relieved; the implications of what Azazel was saying was more important.

"But it wouldn't have been CIA," she said. "Couldn't be, not here  you mean FBI."

Later, she would learn that they were both wrong, that the agents that Azazel had seen at the jail were neither FBI or CIA, though a few had been with the CIA before the Cuban crisis. They were part of S.H.I.E.L.D., a covert, top secret and entirely new organization, and while the Brotherhood was busy tracking down and recruiting a motley collection of Mutants, S.H.I.E.L.D. had already assembled an organized and well-tuned collection of the best and brightest agents the nation had to offer, including several who were not themselves exactly or entirely human. While Mystique was learning how to shoot a .45 and grappling with the implications of doing harm to others, S.h.I.E.L.D. had already begun development on entirely new weapons systems to combat and neutralize the Mutant menace.

And later after that, when she found herself trapped and alone with a man who blamed her in his pain for everything they had lost, after she had been robbed even of the ability to bury her dead, she would look back at this time, which would seem like such good days in retrospect, and marvel at how stupid they had been to believe that they might ever have even stood a chance.

It was the hesitation that had damned them, she would think then, all the playing at preparing themselves for the coming battle. If they'd taken the war to the humans on the first day after Cuba they might well have settled things definitively and on their own terms.

But that was then and this was still now, and now Azazel simply shrugged with one shoulder. "What difference does it make?" he said. "They are government men, and all government men everywhere are all the same. In any case, I went to report to Erik what I had seen, and this is why it has taken me so long to come back."

"Oh," she said. "What did Erik say?"

"Very little," Azazel said, "But he seemed neither worried nor surprised."

"Oh," she said again. Mystique turned the light off and laid back down, and he'd nestled up against her and had draped his arm over her again.

Mystique had begun to think that he was asleep when Azazel spoke again. "I have question," he said.

"Yes?" she said, nervous, but what he said had no relation to the things she had been thinking and fretting about.

"Is 'Luke and Matthew is going to such-and-such place' or 'Luke and Matthew are going to such-and-such place?'"

"What?"

"Which is correct?"

"I don't know..." she said, frowning as she tried to focus on the question. "I think... the second? You should ask Erik  he'd know. He always knows about stuff like that."

There was a brief pause, and then Azazel spoke again. "I have another question," he said. "Do you think you could turn into Luke and Matthew, if you tried?"

"I don't know," she said again, at once fascinated and intimidated by the idea. "It feels like that would be... too much. I guess."

"This is what I thought. It would be very strange to become two different people at once. I would be confused."

She laughed at that, and the sound was bitterer than she'd intended it to be. That was the thing about Azazel; he was never of two minds. He always knew exactly who he was, not matter what. _Lucky him..._

"Mystique, are you alright?" And that was another thing about Azazel; he was the only one who called her by her Mutant name  all the other still called her Raven. She supposed that meant that Azazel imagined that she was knew who she really was, but she wasn't at all sure that she was even qualified to make any such judgments on that matter.

"I'm fine," she lied. "Just tired."

Azazel seemed to accept that answer, or in the least he had dropped the question and fallen silent, and not long after that she had been able to tell from the rhythm of his breathing that he was asleep.

It wasn't that easy for her.


	27. Chapter 27

_"Where will you choose to make your stand? Give me a threshold, a specific point at which you'll finally stop running. At which you'll finally fight back. Stand with me. Stand and fight. I am one, and we would be two. Two more might join and we would be four. When four more join we will be eight. We will be eight people fighting whom others will join. And then more people. And more. Stand and fight." - Derrick Jensen_

_"Unless one lives and loves in the trenches it is difficult to remember that the war against dehumanization is ceaseless." - Audre Lorde_

* * *

The smell of breakfast cooking wafted through the Headquarters of the Brotherhood of Mutants the next morning, the scents of skillet steak and fried eggs, biscuits and hash browns and grits and fresh coffee spreading through the old hotel building. It drew folks downstairs, alone or in pairs, even those who'd had a long night.

Remy LeBeau hadn't slept so good. He'd been awake most of the night, tossing and turning in an unfamiliar bed in a drafty room while he thought over his life up until now and his options for the future. This was the type of thinking that he usually liked to avoid, but he figured that he didn't really have much of a choice about that now. There were some things he had to decide on, and quick would be better than slow.

When Remy followed his nose downstairs to the kitchen, he found the other Mutants were already there, odd bunch that they were. They were arrayed around a big old kitchen table with that big old boy called Fred presiding over them like a big old mother hen fussing over her chicks. Fred settled a third platter of fresh eats down among the others on the table, then sat down with the others and started to fill his own plates.

Remy stood in the doorway for a moment, watching them and thinking hard on what he saw. The red man with the heavy accent was sitting in his stuffy black suit beside the blue girl who didn't wear anything, his devil's tail twined around the leg of her chair, the flat of its tip resting against the juncture of her foot and ankle. On Raven's other side, there was the bug-eyed little boy with the flat stare, crouched on all fours on his kitchen chair, froggy legs bent like pistons beneath him. Then there was Luke and Matthew ( _Or is it Matthew then Luke?_ he wondered  he _thought_ Luke was the one on the left, but he wasn't sure enough to bet on it), the two of them bickering with each other like brothers did, all three arms busy snatching things from near-by platters of food and feeding their two mouths.

Fred was at the head of the table, more than taking up the extra space that came with that position. On the other side of the table there was the quiet man, sitting next to the woman who had tried to talk sense to Raven the day before, and gotten her head bit off for the trouble. That gal was named Angel, if Remy remembered right, but he didn't think anyone had ever told him what the man was called. The blond woman named Emma, the one with the mean mouth, was sitting further down the table, with a lot of space between herself and the others. Erik Lehnsherr was at the table end, Azazel to his right and no one on his left.

"You going to sit down and get something to eat or are you just going to stand there and staring at people all day?" Fred demanded, startling Remy out of his thoughts. He shrugged in a way that he hoped looked easy, flashed Fred a smile that he hoped was disarming, and stepped into the kitchen.

Remy sat down between Emma and Lehnsherr, leaving one empty chair between himself and the other man and two or three between himself and Emma. That put Remy directly across from Raven, and he tried to send her a smile, but she was looking studiously down at her newspaper and didn't see him.

There were stacks of other newspapers on the table, among the platters and dishes and silverware and all, and just about everybody at the table had a paper opened in front of him or her, scanning the pages while they ate. Even the kid was staring at the funny pages. The newspapers were from just about everywhere, so far as Remy could tell; a lot of them didn't even seem to be in English.

"Hey, I think I found one," Matthew said excitedly. He turned his and Luke's paper around for the others to see. Remy was only close enough to read the big line of text at the top of the page: **OBITUARIES**. "It says here this guy died of 'spontaneous combustion.' He was all alone, and he just caught on fire and burned right up for no reason, and no one can explain how it happened. So that's got to be a Mutant, right?"

Luke's bottom hand dropped his fork onto his plate. He used his top hand to do a face palm. "And what earthly good does that do us, anyway," he demanded from between splayed fingers, "if he's dead?"

"I just thought it was interesting," Matthew replied defensively.

Lehnsherr glanced up briefly from his own paper and said, "You understand that you're not supposed to be looking for Mutants on the obit page, yes? You should be looking for unusual _human_ deaths, strange accidents or killings that may have been caused by Mutants."

"I don't get why ya'll would be tryin' to recruit murderers anyway," Remy said. He figured this for a completely reasonable question, but the others didn't seem to feel like it was worth answering. A few faltered briefly in what they were doing, as though what he had said was so embarrassingly stupid that they had to sit and think about it for a minute, but they didn't say anything. He thought he saw Angel actually roll her eyes. Only Raven looked up at him, a quick and furtive glance that ended as soon as she saw he was looking back.

Lehnsherr sipped his tea. The silence went on. After a while Remy got himself a plate and reached across the table for some eggs.

A few minutes after that Emma suddenly got to her feet, the legs of her chair scrapping on the floor, and walked over to Lehnsherr. She flung the paper she had been reading down on the table in front of him. Lehnsherr glanced briefly at the article she was jabbing her finger at, then turned his eyes back to his own paper. "I've already read that one, thank you."

"I warned you that this would happen, didn't I?"

"These theatrics are for your benefit," Lehnsherr said to the table at large. "We could just as easily be having this conversation silently. But she wishes to make a demonstration of what a shitty leader I am." He turned back to his paper.

None of that even slowed Emma down. "I told you that you needed to send Azazel back to kill the goddamned guard," she said. "Now look  he's running his mouth to the press."

Lehnsherr did not even bother to look up at her. "Waste of time," he said, enunciating each word with cutting precision.

He reached for his tea cup, took a sip before continuing. "God knows, Emma, that _you_ already know how I feel about this." He raised his eyes to the rest of the table. "It doesn't really matter what the press prints about us at this point. Most will dismiss it, and whether or not anyone believes what this man has to say is actually besides the point. Eventually, the general public will learn that Mutants exists, and when that day comes we'll deal with it as conditions dictate.

"The only thing that's relevant right now is the government," and he went on, slipping suddenly and flawlessly into yat, "ol' Earl don't know nothin' de guv'ment didn't already know."  

"You makin' fun o' me?" Remy asked.

"Certainly not," Lehnsherr said, suddenly stiff. He picked up Emma's paper and held it out to Remy. "Here, you'll want to read this."

Remy took the paper, realizing as he did so that it was a copy of the Picayune. The second thing he saw about it was that his own face was on the front page. " _Oh Gawd_ ," he said, his voice coming so soft that even he could barely hear it. The others didn't seem to notice.

Azazel was speaking. "I would not have gone in any case, Emma."

"You won't have?" Raven said, and there was something her voice that Remy would have paid more attention to if he wasn't busy reading about how Lehnsherr and his 'Brotherhood of Mutants' had ruined his life.

" _Nyet_ ," Azazel said firmly, and Remy was pretty sure that was Russian-talk for 'no.' "Frankly, I think Remy should learn better taste in whom he considers comrade. Nonetheless, he asked Mystique not to kill the man, and why should he not get his way in this? Erik is right. This man does not matter at all  whether or not he is dead makes no difference to us."

Remy sure as hell didn't count Earl, who could be awful loose with that nightstick of his if you didn't move fast enough to suit him, to be a 'comrade' but if that idea was the main thing that was keeping Azazel from cutting the guy's throat Remy wasn't going to argue the point. Anyway, Earl wasn't the main thing on his mind at the moment, that was for sure.

"My Maw-maw is never gonna stop cryin'," he said miserably, looking down at his picture and the accompanying article.

"Jail break," the article said. "Wanted for assaulting an officer of the law," it said. "Reward for any information leading to the capture of Remy LeBeau or accomplices," it went on to say. It also mentioned a whole lot of other stuff, mostly quotes from Earl about what he had seen, but it was obvious that the paper had only printed all that because they thought it was interesting, and not because they really believed in it.

"You are not pleased that we let you out of that cell?" Azazel asked him, with what seemed like genuine, if offended, bafflement. Azazel, who could not be caged, held the idea of being trapped inside a jail cell with superstitious dread, but Remy did not know this and at the moment would not really have cared if he had.

He gaped at Azazel. "Dat was just the drunk tank," he said. "Dey've let me out, once I sobered up. I'd be out already, if you'd left me there..." He paused, trying to bring himself under control; he was just about shouting, and it didn't seem like a good idea to be shouting at Azazel. He'd been friendly enough  aside from the matter of hurting Earl, which Remy blamed Lehnsherr for rather than the blue girl, they'd all been real friendly  but there was a snake behind those pale blue eyes. Remy figured he'd seen enough of the world to know that much.

But when he'd tamped his temper down despair welled up in its place. "Oh Gawd," he said again. "How am I ever gonna go back home now?" he asked everybody and no one, closer to tears now than he'd been while sober in years.

"Remy, you _are_ home," Raven said, in a voice that was all at once gentle and earnest and guilty and desperate to convince itself of its own sincerity. Remy looked up at her to see if she really believed that noise; he wasn't sure, but he thought maybe she did.

"I ain't anywhere _near_ home," he said. "I am in Chicago  Gawd only knows why  and it's too Gawd damned _cold_ here." He stood up from the table and left, heading back to his own room, and no one tried to call him back.

Raven walked as quietly as a cat. Remy was all the way back to his room and had his hand on the door knob before he realized that she was following him.

He turned toward Raven, and saw that now that they were alone her face was more open. Remy could see that she was sorry for the trouble they had caused him, even if she didn't say so.

She was a kind girl  he was sure of that, even after what she'd done to Earl  but there was something eating her up alive. _They ruining her here,_ he thought. _That Azazel is helping_  he'd already worked out that the two of them were lovers  _but mostly it's Lehnsherr. There's a reptile behind that man's eyes, same as there is in the Russian's, but it isn't no snake; he's a swamp gator, cold and calculating and endlessly patient, just waiting for when the moment's right to drag his prey down into the dark water with him._

Remy wanted to tell Raven that  he wanted to say something that would convince her to come away from this with him, to walk away before it was too late, because if she stayed here there would be other Earls, and maybe next time she wouldn't drop the knife  but it wasn't just a matter of making her believe that that was where all this was headed, because he guessed she already knew that, but of convincing her that she really didn't want to become part of what was under that black water.

He came at it sideways, because he was afraid that if he said too much of that outright he'd only drive her off. And he tried his best to wash the yat out of his mouth when he spoke, because he wanted her to understand everything he said just as well as he could make her understand it. "I know it's a hard ol' world, and most folks don't treat other folks anywhere near right, 'specially 'f dey  _if they're_  different. But, Raven, that don't mean we gotta be as mean as it is."

"That's naïve, Remy," she said. "And you've missed the point completely."

"Just listen t' me, okay? Just hear me out for a little bit now. I don't want to fight nobody, and I don't wanna hurt nobody. I don't want any mo' of this mean and ugly 'n heavy stuff in my life than has ta be there. The bad you gotta take anyway is more than any person deserves, so why would you wanna go lookin' for more? I just want to drink and play cards and make love with beautiful women, ya know?

"I just wanna get as much happiness out of dis po' old life as I can. What's so wrong with that? Don't you want somethin' like that?"

"Remy... everyone wants something like that. Everyone wants a peaceful, simple, _normal_ life." Her voice was sad, and for an instant he thought he had her. "Everyone wants that, but "

"Don't say 'but,'" he begged her. "Just say you'll come 'way from here with me. I swear I'll make you happy."

For the briefest moment Raven had looked at him as though he had suddenly and without provocation slapped her. Then her face closed up against him, the softer emotions that had been there only an instant before disappearing from her features to show instead absolutely nothing by way of feeling, but he could see predator in her eyes now, as clearly as it had been in the eyes of the two men, and as clearly as he had seen it in her in the instant before she had decided to let Earl go instead, but it wasn't anything like a reptile. It was something hot-blooded and more deliberately and consciously vicious than any snake or gator could ever be, something like a swap cat, or like the tigers he'd seen at the Audubon Zoo when he'd been a boy.

And when he saw that he started to wonder if he'd gotten everything backwards, began in fact to doubt the idea that he understood anything at all about what was going on in this place.

"That's what everyone wants," she said again. "But we won't be allowed to have it."

And Raven turned her back on him and walked away.


	28. Chapter 28

_"The world breaks everyone, and afterward, many are strong in the broken places. But those that will not break, it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these, you can be sure it will kill you too, but there will be no special hurry." - Ernest Hemingway_

* * *

When Mystique returned to the kitchen after leaving Remy behind, it was to an argument.

She stood in the doorway, watching Fred yelling at Luke and Mathew. While she was gone most of the others had left the table, and the kitchen was empty except for those three and Todd.

"I already told you guys not to call Todd that," Fred was saying. "That ain't his name, it's just something someone mean stuck on him to make fun."

"What's this 'you guys' junk?" Matthew demanded, almost as hotly as Fred, though not nearly as loud. "I didn't say anything."

"If he says his name is Toad, then Toad's his name," Luke said, in a voice that was straining to remain civil - Mystique had an idea that they'd had his fight more than once before. "You can't just decide to change his name, Fred."

Todd ( _Toad?_ ) was sitting between Fred and Luke and Matthew, crouched so low in his chair that only his eyes showed above the table. He struck Mystique as being in desperate need of rescue, so she went around the table and crouched next to his chair, going down to his eye-level.

"Hey, you," she said, trying to sound friendly without being too pushy. "Do you want to go outside and play for a while?"

The boy looked back at her dubiously. He seemed less frightened this morning, and Mystique counted that as an improvement, though the fear had been replaced by an almost haughty sort of detachment, a look that told Mystique that he wasn't especially impressed with her and did not on any account trust her. That Todd should feel this way was not surprising to Mystique  she had dealt with Charles's parents in much the same way for the longest time, though she had tried not to be so transparent about her own feelings with them.

The boy didn't answer, but Fred did. "Outside?" he said dubiously. "Is that safe?"

"Just out to the courtyard," Mystique explained, wondering just what they would do about the boy in the long term  she thought it would probably be safe to take him out in public if it was absolutely necessary to do so, so long as they were very careful not to attract attention, but what about school? What about friends? "I'll bring him back safe."

Mystique stood. She didn't offer the boy her hand or anything like that  she felt as though that would be asking for too much  but just looked down and asked, "You coming?" and when she turned to leave the boy fell into step beside her.

His gait was bow-legged and awkward, each step a production of stretching a leg that didn't seem made to go that way as far as it would go. He walked in a slouch, eyes on his feet, shoulders slumped and back bowed. She wondered if this was only a product of bad posture and low morale, or if there was some congenital deformity to his spine, or if this stance was an aspect of his mutation.

"Is it comfortable for you walk like that?" she asked him, but the boy didn't answer. He kept his eyes on the ground. "Because it doesn't look comfortable to _me_ ," she went on, "and if it isn't, in fact, comfortable, then you shouldn't do it. You should just move the way that feels right to you."

He craned his neck around sharply, to look at her from over his slopped shoulder. The boy's expression said that he believed she was trying to spring some nasty trap on him. "Look at me," she said, though the boy already was. She came to a stop in the hallway. "See how different I look? Everybody here is a little bit different. No one is going to get mad at you for being different, too."

The boy didn't answer, but she could tell he was thinking about what she'd said; he was frowning hard, and was working his lower-lip between his teeth.

"What's your real name?" she asked him. She didn't say, 'Is your name Toad or Todd?' because she wasn't actually sure either of those were the answer he really wanted to give her. He dropped his eyes and shrugged his shoulders, but still didn't say anything.

Later, once the kid had settled in and found his voice, he would turn out to be a real motormouth. He would become loud and opinionated and stubborn about those opinions, as well as quite frequently sarcastic and mean. There would be times when Mystique would find herself locked in an argument with Todd over something which she simply did not have the option of giving ground on but which he absolutely would not drop, and she would catch herself feeling almost nostalgic for this early, bruised silence. And when this happened she would feel immediately guilty, and would look for someway to make it up to the boy for having thought such an unworthy thoughts, and would try afterall to find someway to get him whatever it was he wanted. In the coming years, it would always be so difficult to give the children what they deserved - all the things that _normal_ children might take for granted - but Todd was less forgiving of these shortcomings than Kurt and Anna Marie would be.

But for now, the boy kept his silence. She started forward again, and Todd followed with a tentative sort of hopping, legs bent and springy, moving in tandem as he bounced along after her, occasionally bracing his palms against the floor before the next jump.

When she opened the door to courtyard he bounded past her and outside. With one huge leap he landed in the branches of the gnarled oak, and then he was going higher and higher, jumping from branch to branch and pulling himself upward by those arms which had appeared to be so weak and spindly. Colorful fall leaves fluttered to the ground in his wake. Very soon he had all but disappeared among the branches.

Mystique circled the tree, trying not to fret or in the very least not to appear fretful. She wanted to call up and tell him to be careful, but understood that this advice would at best be ignored and would very likely also be resented.

She did not at first notice Janos. He was on the other side of the courtyard, sitting back on his haunches in front of a little alcove at the junction of the two of the building's wings. He seemed entirely engrossed with whatever it was he was watching, and Mystique didn't think he'd even realized that she and Todd were there.

Mystique came up behind him, wondering what he watching so intently, and saw a small whirlwind dancing across the paving stones, leaves spinning in its embrace.

"Are you making that?" Mystique asked him, coming around to his side.

He lifted his head and gave her an embarrassed smile. "No," he said, "They make themselves." Janos turned his eyes skyward, motioned with his hands. "It has to do with the winds, coming off the lake. They get trapped between the walls of the building, I think, and come down here to spin. Do you see?"

Mystique was not sure that she did see, though she didn't know if he was explaining it incorrectly or if she simply wasn't getting it. "I never noticed them before," she said, watching another gust blow three or four colorful leaves high into the air before releasing them to flutter back to the ground, "but they're actually very pretty."

"Yes," he said, nodding his head emphatically. His mannerism were almost giddy; had she not known better, she might almost have thought he was slightly tipsy, but she had, after all, seen this type of thing before.

It was the same sort of avid interest with which she'd seen Hank approach any new challenge to his intellect, a craving for new knowledge to simulate his mutated brain. She'd seen this in Erik as well, when they had visited a hardware store together to get something or another for the Headquarters; Mystique had watched him come to a sudden halt in front of the nail bins. He had not reached out to touch any of the tens of thousands of differently shaped bits of metal with his hands, nor had he moved them with his ability, but he had clearly _felt_ all those nails with some deep internal sense, and the pleasure on his face had been almost childlike in its simplistic contentment.  

"I love it here," he said, his words coming in a sudden rush. "The winds  they blow a different direction in the night than they do in the daytime, have you noticed that?" Mystique hadn't, but he wasn't really expecting an answer, anyway. "I'd heard people say that this is the 'windy city,' but I thought that was just something people said, that it was only a name  I didn't think that it was true. But it is." He smiled again, and she thought strangely, _He's beautiful when he smiles like that._

But what she said was, "I don't think I've ever heard you string so many words together before. Your English lessons must be going very well."

Mystique wished at once that she hadn't said it, because he immediately became self-conscious. She thought, not for the first time, that the problem had never really been his English, but rather a fear of making mistakes, of being seen to look foolish  she supposed Erik would not have had much tolerance for that type of thing and would have put an end to it very quickly. "Erik is a very good teacher," he said.

That was another thing that Mystique wasn't so sure about, but she nodded in agreement. She glanced back at the tree; Todd was still bouncing around, high in the branches. "I should be watching the kid," she said. "I mean, if he decides to fall out of the tree and break his neck I won't be able to do anything _except_ watch him do it, but, you know..."

It was an invitation, and Janos took it. "I'll help you watch him. If he falls? I catch him." He held his hand up, a compact and miniature cyclone whirling on his palm to demonstrate how he would do that.

"Thanks," she said, and led him to the bench in front of the tree.

Mystique regretted this as soon as they had sat down, because the bench also faced the grave of the child from Argentina, and there was no way to sit there without looking at it, and no way to look at it without also thinking about it.

They had put no headstone on the grave, but she could still see very clearly where the soil had been turned up. There were flowers on the grave, some of which Mystique had put there herself, though she wasn't sure who had brought the others. There was a handful of small stones on the grave as well, and she wondered who had put them there and why.

The silence stretched on for what felt like a very long time, until, above their heads, Todd let out a sudden war whoop. The sound of it was wild and gleeful and pure boy. "I don't think he's coming down for a while," Janos said, clearly relieved to have something to say.

"No, I guess not," Mystique agreed.

Remy had been right about one thing; it was cold here, even in the courtyard, where the high walls broke the worst of the wind's bite. She had found that the cold did not especially bother her when she was wearing her own skin, but even bundled up in a heavy wool jacket Janos looked chilly. It was a very nice jacket, though slightly too large for him, with fur trimming at the neck and around the ends of the sleeves. She wondered briefly when and where he might have gotten it, but the the answer was obvious and came to her directly; Azazel would have found it to him, probably even without being asked. Azazel was always coming up with things like that, making gifts of useful things the other Mutants needed almost before they realized that they would need these things.

Now she watched Janos pull the ruff of the jacket up to cover his neck more completely.

"If you're cold, you can just go back inside," she said. "It's not a big deal."

"Don't worry. I am very well here." He said this with a sudden stiff solemnity which confused her; Mystique wondered if she'd somehow offended him.

"... That's good," she said uncertainly.

"That was a joke," he said. "'For Whom the Bell Tolls?' Hemingway!"

"Oh, I get it," she said, though really she didn't. _Hemingway again..._ "You know, Azazel says he  used to drink with Hemingway, back during the war?"

Janos rolled his eyes. "Yeah, I know. He told me."

"You don't believe him?" Mystique asked.

"No, I believe him," Janos said, and now a note of bitterness verging on anger had come into his voice. "But if he was less of an idiot, I think, he could have found something better to do with his time than drinking, Hemingway or no Hemingway."

She didn't quite know what to say to that  she could see no reasonable way to excuse the strategic errors Azazel had admitted to making during his time with the International Brigands  so she just said, "Hm."

"It's the truth. He might have saved lots of us much trouble."

"He told me you were from Spain," she said, scrambling for a change in topic.

"Yes," Janos agreed.

"I didn't even know that until Azazel told me. We've been living at the same place for three months now, and I think this is the first time we've ever even talked together." Janos shrugged. "I feel like I know almost nothing about you."

He shrugged again. "There isn't much to know."

"I don't believe that. Would you tell me, please? About yourself, I mean."

"There isn't anything very interesting to tell," he said, but with a little more prompting, eventually he began to tell his story.


	29. Chapter 29

_"Being the Other means feeling different; it is the awareness of being distinct; it is consciousness of being dissimilar. Otherness means feeling excluded, closed out, precluded, even disdained and scorned. It produces a sense of isolation, of apartness, of disconnectedness, of alienation. The Other disturbs, disquiets, discomforts. It provokes distrust and suspicion. The Other makes people feel anxious, nervous, apprehensive, even fearful. The Other frightens, scares._

  
_"For some of us, being the other is only annoying; for others it is debilitating; for still others it is damning. Many try to flee otherness by taking on protective coloration that provide invisibility, whether in dress or speech or manner or name. Only a fortunate few succeed. For the majority, otherness is permanently sealed by physical appearance. For the rest, otherness is betrayed by ways of being, speaking and doing." - Arturo Madrid_    

* * *

There was, Janos told her, nothing of importance to day of his early years. He was the youngest of four brothers. Their mother was a harried woman, busy with the millions of little and large things that went into managing a household alone, and she'd had very little time for any of them, though he supposed she had done her best. The ghost of his father, martyred in a lost war before Janos had been old enough to formulate a memory of him, hung over the family like a shroud, but this was not an uncommon situation.

"Very many boys I knew did not have fathers," he told her, with a shrug that seemed calculated to say that it didn't hurt. "This was nothing special."

Life had been reasonably good but uneventful. It wasn't until shortly after his fourteenth birthday that things began to change  that he began to sense a change within himself.

His ability had manifested itself slowly, and for a long time his access to it was both sporadic and not especially impressive. Still, from time to time he was able to call up breezes simply by willing them to come into being  sometimes he could even create small whirlwinds. No one else could do such things  Janos was absolutely certain of that much  and it was at this point that the realization came to him that he was different from everyone else around him.

His brothers seemed to recognize this change as well  he supposed his sense of himself as something uniquely special showed in his bearing and his actions  but they misread it horribly. It was around his time that they began to turn against him, though it would be another year yet before that situation came to a head.

It was also around this time that Janos's expectations for his future began to diverge wildly from those of his brothers. His family grew oranges  had done so for generations  and his brothers expected nothing more from life than that they would do the same.

Janos had other ideas, and he wasn't shy about saying so. He supposed that his brothers felt as though he was placing himself above them. He supposed that he had in fact done just that.

He shrugged again. "I didn't used to know when to shut my mouth up."

Janos had by then been to Barcelona almost half a dozen times in his life, and he had decided absolutely that all and everything that was worth living for was to be found there. He fell in love with the architecture and the art, and with the cultured people he glanced on the streets  with every last thing about the city, or at least about the city's nice parts.

When he was fifteen, Janos, his oldest brother, Arnau, and their mother had traveled to the city. It would be their last trip together, and though Janos of course hadn't known that ahead of time he had certainly recognized that something very bad was brewing, and had been for a long time.

Here Janos hesitated in his tale, and began to backtrack. He had never fit in well with his brother, he explained to Mystique, even before he'd begun to discover his ability. He had always been small for his age, and he had a smart mouth that tended to speak up before his brain had the chance to consider the wisdom of his words, and that was a recipe for trouble, but there was more to the problem than that.  

Even from a young age, Janos had been a neat and cautious person, whereas his brothers were often wild and adventurous. He had never cared for rough games or fighting or too much hard work, all of which were things by which his brothers defined themselves. Janos had found himself instead fascinated with books and art and well-tailored clothing, though he'd had little enough experience with any of these things.

All of this had been a source of consternation for his brothers when Janos was younger, but he supposed that they had imagined that he would grow out of it, that at some point he would put aside his strange interests and do the reasonable thing, which would have been to grow into the same sort of man as they were. When it became evident that he had no intention to do any such thing, the situation began to become genuinely ugly.

It started as a joke, Janos supposed, the first time Arnau called him a _maricón_. Even Arnau had seemed scandalized by what he had said, but once it had been said they all began to say it. At first it seemed to Janos that they were simply trying to shame him into behaving differently, but before long it became clear that they had come to believe the truth of it. His angry denials made no difference  in fact, the more he said he wasn't the more convinced his brothers seemed to become that their estimation of him was correct.

His mother had once heard Arnau call Janos this, and she'd chased him across the dooryard with a piece of stove wood for it, knocking Arnau across the shoulders with it until he was whimpering, despite the fact that Arnau was by then almost twice her size. But it had not taken Janos long to understand that his mother had not done this to defend him, but because she believed too that was Arnau was saying was true, and that had caused a panic in her. She and Arnau had before very long made up, but after that day Janos understood that she had begun to look at him very differently, and that perhaps she had been looking at him with that sort of disgusted suspicion for quite some time, and he simply had not been paying enough attention to notice.

In any case, the beating with the piece of stove wood had done nothing to change Arnau's behavior, nor the behavior of his other brothers. They had always been heavy handed with him  What older brother wasn't?  but there was a violence to their bullying now that hadn't been there before.  

It seemed to him that some horrible and irrevocable change had begun, once they'd started to use that word against him. Every day he became less and less their little brother and more and more just the _maricón_ , and there was nothing that was too bad for them to do to a _maricón_. The insults, cuffs and kicks and outright beatings were coming almost constantly by then, and it seemed to him that if things continued to escalate the way they had been the result would be that before long they would kill him.

They had decided that there was simply something fundamentally different about him, and the hell of it was that they were right about that much, but they'd gotten everything twisted around, had turned it into something dirty   

"Wait, I'm sorry," Mystique said, interrupting. "But what's _'maricón'_ mean?" When he'd first said the word, she'd thought that it might mean something similar to 'Mutant,' but it had become clear almost at once that this couldn't be the case.

Janos paused before answering. He would not meet her eyes, and it came to Mystique that he had forgotten himself  or rather, forgotten her. He had told her more than he had meant to, and now he was embarrassed and ashamed. "Faggot," he said at last, spitting the word.

Mystique looked at his face and thought about Charles and Erik, and she thought to herself, _This is a ticking time bomb._

She did not herself know exactly what to do with the question of Erik and Charles's relationship  whatever that relationship might have been and whatever it was now  any more than she knew what to do with her own occasional odd feelings, which seemed to be sneaking up on her more frequently now that she was finding ways to feel more comfortable in her own skin.

But she did know that she loved them both, and that seemed like the main thing. She loved Erik, even as angry and confused she still was over what had happened at the jail, and more than that she had committed herself to sticking by him. And Charles, after all, was still her brother, and at the time she could imagine nothing that could change that fact.   

But it was still 1962, and these things were not even discussed, let along in the company of young women who looked the way Mystique had spent most of her life looking. She had very few rhetorical tools at her disposal, and she could tell that she was on dangerous ground with Janos. This all had the potential to damage the Brotherhood, perhaps irreparably.  

She wanted to say something in defense of Erik and Charles, but she understood almost intuitively that she should not give their secret away, that if Janos was meant to know about this Erik would have told him already. So what Mystique said was, "Even if you had been..." she began, hesitating because she didn't want to verbalize the word he'd used  she was certain it was a mean word  but knowing no other term for it, "that... they didn't have any right to treat you that way."

It was the boldest thing she could think to say while remaining general  without revealing that she had a person stake in this  but it was the wrong thing to say to Janos.  

"I'm not," he said, through clenched teeth, the anger in his voice raw and barely checked. She thought she felt the wind around them pick up, but that might have simply been her imagination.

The silence dragged on. In the branches above them, Todd was still bouncing around; he showed no sign of wearing out. After a while Mystique decided that there was nothing to be lost by taking a chance, so she prompted,"What happened in Barcelona?"

And Janos had gone on, stiffly at first  clearly he was still angry with her  but before long had had slipped back into the narrative. He seemed starved to talk, and she wondered how long he'd been carrying all this, if he'd even ever told it to another person. She did not think, somehow, that he would have told any of this to Angel, but who else was there? Not Azazel, she supposed  she didn't think Janos hated Azazel, not exactly, but he certainly didn't seem to trust him or his judgment. And certainly not Emma, though of course Emma would know anyway. _Erik?_ That seemed a possibility, and she wondered what he might have made of Janos's story.

When they'd gotten to Barcelona, Janos went on, he'd slipped away from his family at the first opportunity. That had been stupid, of course, but back then he had oscillated between fear and stupid, stubborn defiance. He'd gone wandering, taken in by the city lights at twilight, and after a while he'd found himself on the other side of the street from the opera house.   

Janos spend almost half an hour standing there under the street light, watching the well-polished people mingling together outside the opera house's doors. He'd stared hungrily at the smartly dressed men in their fine suits and the beautiful and cultured women who dangled on the arms of those men like brightly colored birds, and he'd felt as though he was looking at everything he'd ever desired. He wanted to be like those well-dressed men, moving like they owned the entire world, so certain and self-possessed. He wanted to be worthy of having one of those delicate and poised women on his arm.

Arnau had come up on him from behind. He'd cuffed Janos across the ear so hard that his entire head had rung, but not so loudly that he couldn't hear Arnau's shouted admonishments and insults.

The people in front of the opera house were looking at them  everyone on the street was looking at them  and that had outraged Janos. His temper (which had always been quick, if ineffectual) had flared up, and he'd said something smart in response  back then he really hadn't known when it was in his own best interest to keep quiet  and Arnau had hit him again and...  

"And what happened next?" Mystique prompted softly.

"He never hit me anymore after that," Janos said.

He had never actually intended to use his ability against his brother  it had not, up until that moment, even occurred to him that it might even be possible to do such a thing  but the wind had come up in response to his shame and rage, and it had lifted Arnau up into the air and slammed his body against one of the opera house's marble pillars.

"I hurt him very badly," Janos said, looking at his hands, and Mystique's first almost guilty impulse had been to ask just how badly.

But she'd paused, thinking of what that must have been like, to be fifteen and effectually alone and struggling to figure yourself out, and to be shamed and beaten in the street like that over something that wasn't even true. She could see Janos, a skinny kid with a higher opinion of himself than the rest of the world felt justified, spitting insults back in the face of the brother who'd struck him. Mystique couldn't imagine where he'd found the pigheaded strength to stand up to such a bully. She didn't think she could have done the same, had she been in the same situation.

So instead she said, "Good. He deserved it," believing that it was the right thing to say. Believing  or else, nearly believing  also that it was true.

Janos didn't answer her. He went on with the story as though she hadn't spoken.

Arnau hadn't gotten up from where he'd fallen, Janos said. A pool of blood had grown beneath the back of his head by the time the ambulance came. He'd been taken a hospital. Janos had gone with him. He'd sat beside Arnau's bed for hours, willing him to open his eyes but Arnau just laid there. The doctors said that the back of his skull had been crushed. They said that there was probably brain damage, that swelling of the brain would likely follow, that they couldn't say what would happen next. Janos stared at his hands and kept his mouth shut when they spoke to him. Eventually, their mother had found them.

Janos had been sure that someone would recognize his guilt, but there had been no accusations. What force it was that had thrown Arnau against that pillar remained a mystery, but one that attracted surprisingly little scrutiny. He thought there was a possibility that Arnau might have been able to tell them who had done it, but Arnau never woke up.

Three days later, Arnau had died.

Janos and his mother had gone home with the body. They had not spoken on the train, nor much at all afterward. He was too afraid to ask, but he thought it likely that his mother did have her own suspicions.

His brothers had been dumbfounded by the lose of Arnau. Without him around to egg them on, they mostly left Janos alone after that.

Janos remembered now how it had been when he was very little, before the _maricón_ lie had divided them, when Arnau had still been his friend and his hero and his favorite big brother. That things had turned out the way they had seemed incomprehensible.

His ability no longer struck him as being such a fine thing. He stopped using it.

The guilt ate at him. Sometimes Janos wanted to scream out the truth, but he was too much of a coward to do so, so instead he withdrew into himself. He did not speak unless spoken to.

Janos felt completely invisible, as though he had died along with Arnau, but at the same time he also felt himself to be constantly exposed, as though the truth was written across his forehead for everyone to see. He couldn't stand to look the other members of his family in the eyes.

He'd left home at the first opportunity. He'd never been back.

Janos fell silent.

 _I should go see Charles_ , Mystique thought suddenly. It struck her as selfish, to be thinking about that now, when she ought to have been focusing on Janos, but the thought persisted. _Azazel could take me, he wouldn't mind. We could leave now _

But then she remembered what had happened with the prison guard. She didn't want Charles to know about that, or about any of the other bad stuff that had been in her head lately, and there was no grantee that he wouldn't look. _He might know already_ , she realized suddenly. _In was in the papers, and he knew where we were going so he might have checked..._

Janos was watching her, waiting, she supposed, for a reaction to what he had told her, but she didn't know what to say. There was nothing, she understood, that she could say to change any of it, so instead she asked, "What happened after that?"

"Shaw," Janos said, and went on with the story.


	30. Chapter 30

_"We must learn and then teach our children that niceness does not equal goodness. Niceness is a decision, a strategy of social interaction; it is not a character trait. People seeking to control others almost always present the image of a nice person in the beginning." -  Gavin De Becker_

_"I don't believe what you say because I see what you do." - James Baldwin_

* * *

It was at this point in the tale that discrepancies began to appear in Janos's story. He deflected questions and omitted details; there were long gaps of time which he refused to fill in. There were also sections of the story that simply didn't mesh, parts that didn't add up. Mystique didn't think he lied to her about anything  not exactly  but there were points at which he was obviously working to obscure the truth.

Mystique didn't hold any of this against him; they all had their own ways of hiding, after all, and some disguises were easier to give up than others.

Janos had, he said without further preamble, met Shaw in Argentina in '56, though Shaw was not going by that name at the time.

This sudden transition left Mystique confused, and she tried to get him to back up, to provide further details about what had lead up to their meeting. "How old were you at the time?" she asked.

Janos hesitated before answering, then said, "Around seventeen, I think... maybe a little younger.

That left a one to two year long blank spot in his story which begged all sorts of questions. When and how had Janos come to be in Argentina? Had he chosen to travel to that country for a specific reason, or had some outside factor brought him there? How had he paid for his travel expenses, and how had he supported himself after he arrived there? And most importantly, how exactly had he come into contact with Shaw  who had recognized the other as a Mutant first, and how?

Janos cut her off before she had even asked the first of these questions. He shook his head and said, "Those things aren't important," in a way that was clearly meant to communicate that he did not intend to speak about it, or at least not on her terms. She dropped the questions and allowed him to go on in his own way.

"The thing about Shaw was that he had a way of speaking to you that made you feel as though you were the most important person in the world," Janos said, in a low voice that Mystique had to strain to make out. His hands were folded in his lap, everything but the tips of his fingers engulfed by  the furry cuffs of his over-sized overcoat, and he stared down at them as he spoke.

"He would speak to you, and it was like there was no one else in the world except for you and him, and he would tell you that you were special, and unique, and of value, and you would believe that this was true because of the way he said it, because it was impossible not to believe absolutely that he believed it."

If Janos had ever been told such things about himself by someone else, he couldn't remember it. He had believed that he had long ago resigned himself to the absence of a father in his life, and to the distance of his mother the disdain of his brothers. He had not believed that he needed anyone else's support or affirmation to know who he was.

He had been horribly wrong about that. Shaw's praise was like the first drop of water on the tongue of a boy dying of thirst. Once he'd had that first taste of approval he had craved more, had needed desperately to be told that he was something good and great and that he had the right to be proud of what he was.

Janos's sense of self-worth up until then had been built from cobbled together scraps. After he met Shaw he swept that old estimation of himself aside and accepted what Shaw told him as his truth instead; it would only be later that he would realize how totally he had subjugated his entire sense of himself to Shaw's assessment of him, and how dependent upon Shaw that had made him.

But at first what Shaw told Janos about himself was not, after all, that much different from the juvenile vanities that had supported Janos's stiff-necked but fragile sense of pride back before what had happened to Arnau. The only difference was now Janos had the reinforcement of a powerful and confident Mutant who had a great talent for putting what had been for Janos only fuzzy ideas into articulate and moving arguments.

"He told you what you wanted to hear," Mystique said.

"Yes," Janos agreed. "He was always very good at that."

The fact that Janos's ability had caused such great hurt and damage to his family and to himself began to seem less important. Under Shaw's direction, Janos began to feel as though he'd repented enough, as though he'd made himself miserable with his guilt and grief for long enough. He began  very slowly at first, and then with abandon  to feel proud of his ability once again.

"Shaw had a way of just seeming to know everything you had ever wanted but hadn't dared to hope for," Janos said. "And he had a way of making you believe that he wanted those things for you too, and that he would get them for you, and all you had to do was follow along."

It was only a few days after they first met that Shaw began to refer to Janos as "son." He did this without fanfare of discussion, and so Janos  taking his cue from Shaw as he always did in those early days  didn't comment on it, either. But he had felt deeply touched in a way which now in retrospect made him almost sick. When Shaw had said that Janos had felt himself in danger of weeping, it had meant that much to him then.

There was, of course, another element to Shaw's philosophy. It's flip-side. If Mutants were the height of the evolutionary process, then that meant by definition that there had to be someone inferior, someone that was beneath them, and it wasn't very difficult to figure out who. But the thing about that was that if Janos looked at things the way Shaw told him he ought to, everything that had been tearing Janos up inside would fade away into a triviality, and that prospect was desperately appealing.

If he could believe that humans were scum and Mutants were princes and gods, then it absolutely did not matter what Janos's mother or surviving brothers felt or didn't feel toward him. If Janos could believe that people like himself and Shaw were the future and humans were just vermin who served only to pollute a world that rightfully belonged to Mutants, then he had cut off nothing meaningful when he'd ended Arnau's life. If he believed Shaw, then it would be possible for him to be released from all his guilt and shame.

But the problem was, he never really did believe Shaw.

Early on, Janos tried to. He wanted desperately to believe Shaw, and sometimes  especially when Shaw was speaking directly to him about the bright prospects of a future guided and dominated by Mutants, by them  he actually thought that he did believe.

But there were nagging doubts which he simply couldn't quash no matter how much he wanted to.

Shaw talked about how they were a whole new and distinct species, but that didn't make sense to Janos. He might have been a country boy, but he was reasonably well educated, and he'd done a lot reading on his own. Shaw often compared humans and Mutants to dogs and foxes, but it was an elementary observation that one of the big things which separated one species from another was the fact that members of two different species could almost never interbred; a fox was a fox and a dog was a dog, and they were distinctly different types of animals because a fox and a dog couldn't make pups together.

But that wasn't the case with humans and Mutants. Janos's mother and brothers had all been human, and (though he couldn't personally vouch for this fact) his father had almost certainly been human as well. Yet here was Janos. He'd come from human stock and he saw no reason to doubt that, if he were to take up with a human girl, she would before very long give him children without any more than the usual degree of difficulty. The only question in his mind was the likelihood of these children being human or Mutant.

Perhaps their generation of Mutants was on its way to becoming a new species, but that was a long way off  tens of thousands of years, in the natural course of things, if not much, much longer  and though he and Shaw were doubtlessly very different from other people, he believed that this difference had more in common with the difference between two breeds of dog or sheep that than the differences between species.

Shaw spoke also of taking command, of seizing the world which was their birthright, and this struck Janos as too impossible to even consider seriously. When Shaw said such things, Janos assumed it was only talk. There were, after all, almost three billion people on the planet, and even as powerful as Shaw was, they weren't going to step aside and let him take the wheel.

Anyway, even if they found more of their own kind, he did not see any plausible way that they could divorce themselves from human society and human culture, even if they wished to do so. It did not, moreover, seem entirely sensible to Janos to want to do such a thing.

He didn't argue. Janos kept his opinions to himself, halfway convinced that he was simply too ignorant to grasp Shaw's ideas, but there was always that lingering sense of uncertainty.

But there was more about Shaw that was wrong even than this much, and Janos supposed that he had known that from the start. But he had wanted Shaw's respect and his approval very badly, so he had put those misgivings and doubts to the side.

At the time that Janos met him, Shaw had been in possession of a yacht. It was not, Janos explained, the special one with the attached submarine  that had come later  but it was posh and stylish and clean, and Janos had felt terribly out of place when he set foot on that boat.

"I had not been doing very well, since I had left home," Janos said, still evasive about the details, and Mystique took this to mean that he'd been on the streets. She wondered if he'd been a thief, as she herself and Azazel had been. There were other possibilities, she knew, but she hoped very much that he'd been forced into nothing worse than thievery, but that was not a question which she would possibly ask.  

Mystique understood by then that she'd have to settle for what he was willing to give her, which was in any case, perhaps more than she'd actually wanted.

Aside from Shaw, Janos went on, there were two other people on the yacht; a woman her small boy. The two of them were as shy and quiet as deer, and so evasive that sometimes Janos forgot that they were on board with him.  

The woman was named Alicia, and she was what other Argentinians referred to as an ethnic German. This was a term, Janos had learned, which actually included a wide range of people of European ancestry, hailing from anywhere from France to Russia and all points in between. (At the time, Shaw had also presented himself to be _germano argentino_ , though later it would become clear to Janos that this was a lie). She and Shaw spoke Spanish between each other, though Shaw would sometimes slip into German if he had something private to say to Alicia. Janos had the sense that Alicia's own German was halting.

"Alicia is a Mutant," Shaw had told Janos when they first met.

Janos had been wondering about that, and this confirmation made him very happy; an instant after Janos felt this feeling, Alicia's face lit up and she smiled what Janos thought was a very genuine but somewhat dopey smile. "What is your ability?" Janos asked her.

Shaw answered for her. "She's an empath," Shaw said, and it was at that moment that Janos realized that dumb grin Alicia had given him was a transcription of his own feelings. He felt embarrassed, and an instant later an expression of chagrin had appeared on Alicia's face.

When Shaw went on there had been a note of... something in his voice that Janos couldn't quite name. Later, when Shaw began to use the same tone of voice to speak to and of Janos, he would come to recognize it as disinterest. But at the time, Janos had difficulty recognizing this tone for what it was, because Shaw had never used it around him before. Shaw had, of course, given Janos the idea that he was endlessly fascinating, even if Shaw had been the one to do most of the talking during their conversations.

"She feels other people's emotions," Shaw explained. "But you've probably noticed that already. Physical sensations as well  pain and pleasure and so on. It's not an especially useful ability, in all honesty, but it had its interesting aspects." Shaw raised a finger and focused those intense eyes on Janos's. "Let me ask you a question. Purely hypothetically. If Alicia were to see another person killed, do you think she would die as well?"

This was an extremely disquieting question, and though Janos worked to keep his expression neutral, Alicia's own face gave everything away.

"I... I don't know," Janos said, uneasily.

Shaw became suddenly magnanimous, almost jolly. "Well, let us just hope that we never find out the answer to that question," he said lightly. He patted Alicia on the back before walking off across the yacht's deck and disappearing into his own cabin.

"That was to be understood to be a threat," Alicia said to Janos. "He's telling you, 'Don't give me a reason to test my hypothesis with you as one of the subjects.'" Janos had watched his own astonishment and disbelief war on Alicia's face with her own cynical fear.

Janos had not known how to respond to that. He'd stood there awkwardly while Alicia watched him. She had very old eyes, and he saw all of his own fears reflected in them. Finally, he'd simply changed the subject.

"We haven't been introduced," he said, gesturing to the boy who had spent the entirety of the conversation huddled behind his mother's skirt. He was mestizo, and from that simple fact it was obvious that he was not Shaw's, but the question of who the boy's father had been or what had become of him was one of the many to which Janos would never find an answer. (Janos came around the topic sideways, never saying so outright, but Mystique had the sense that he had been very curious about what it might be like to go to bed with a woman with an ability like Alicia's, but that he had never had the nerve or the opportunity to find out).

"His name is Raul," Alicia said, and spoke no more of him. That boy was her silent shadow, always with her but almost never heard. Later, after, it would come to Janos that though they'd they'd been on the boat together for nearly a month, he had heard Raul speak no more than half a dozen words.

Alicia was almost as difficult to draw out. Because of her ability, her face was an open book, but one which only rarely told her own story. She was taciturn and cautious, attentive toward Shaw's moods and needs and extremely protective toward Raul. On that first day, she'd shown Janos into the cabin that would be his own and then disappeared entirely for hours.

So, Janos found himself settled into the lap of luxury. Shaw provided everything. Comfort. Money. A sense of security. For the first time in a long time, he didn't have to worry about where his next meal would come from. He could wake up in the morning with a certainty that he would be sleeping in the same place that night. Janos had his own spacious cabin in the yacht, a wardrobe full of stylish suits. (Shaw was a bit dubious about the bright colors that Janos was inclined toward, but this was one of the very few instances in which Janos had not adopted Shaw's opinions and tastes as his own). Shaw's generosity knew no bounds.

Janos had not been entirely insensible to the possibility that he was being led into a trap when he had agreed to join Shaw, but at the time he hadn't felt that there were any better options opened to him. And more fool he, he had trusted Shaw.  

In the coming days, he would feel that trust shaken, sometimes by the cryptic warnings that Alicia provided during the rare instances when she spoke to him and in other cases by Shaw's own words and actions. These were the warning tremors of a catastrophic earthquake, but Janos had not heeded them.

It was not, he insisted to Mystique now, that he was entirely blind to the fact that there was something deeply wrong with Shaw, but Shaw seemed to have a way to sense when he was doubting, and knew how to cancel out those doubts. Sometimes he did this with rhetoric that made Janos feel very fine about himself and about the fact that he was a Mutant, and very lucky to part of Shaw's team. In other cases Shaw applied a subtle sort of bullying (which Janos did not at the time recognize as bullying; he had believed that Shaw was only being frankly honest) which left Janos feeling as though he was absolutely nothing, and this tactic would invariably leave him desperate to correct everything that was wrong with himself so that Shaw would not have cause to lose faith in him.

All of his energy went into thinking about ways to secure Shaw's approval. The presence of Alicia and Raul barely registered for Janos.

Alicia was everywhere, and Raul always at her tail, but they were unobtrusive. Alicia managed everything on the yacht; the shopping, the cleaning, the cooking. She was always busy, and everything she did was did was absolutely flawless, and yet she was almost invisible in her work.

Once Janos had her why she worked so hard. It seemed to him that the yacht was impeccably neat and clean, and that Alicia could afford to spend an afternoon relaxing. She hadn't bothered to look up at him, but said, "He normally keeps people who meet his expectations around. Not always, but most of the time."

But Janos hadn't paid much attention to that. Honestly, by then he had begun to feel that Alicia was paranoid about Shaw. She seemed convinced that he was some type of monster, but Janos had seen nothing to justify that opinion. In the time that Janos had been there, Shaw hadn't acted angrily toward anyone on the ship. In fact, he had not so much as raised his voice.

When he asked Alicia about this, she told him, "He doesn't feel anger. That makes him more dangerous, not less."

Well, Shaw could be condescending toward Alicia, but otherwise Janos thought he acted like a perfect gentleman. He was fatherly and indulgent toward Raul  he was always giving the boy candies and chocolates  though Alicia seemed dead set on keeping Raul away from him.

Raul was not a Mutant  or rather, if he was he had not yet manifested an ability. Alicia insisted that he was absolutely one of them. Shaw allowed that this was a statistical likelihood, but seemed strangely uninvested in the prospect.   

In one of the rare instances when they had all had a conversation together, Alicia claimed to have actualized when she was ten. For Janos, of course, it had begun at fourteen. Shaw claimed that his ability had begun to manifest his ability at the age of twelve, and claimed also to have had contact with two other Mutants, a male who had also manifested around his twelfth birthday and a girl who's power had begun to develop when she was eleven. (Shaw did not explain what had happened to these other Mutants or how he had met them, but in retrospect it seemed obvious that the first had been Erik).

From this limited data pool, Shaw had drawn the tentative conclusion that the manifestation of abilities was sometimes  but by no means always  linked with the onset of puberty, and that girls might be inclined toward manifesting at a younger age than boys.

These were, Janos thought even then, shaky conclusions, and many of them had proven to be wrong. "I was talking to Fred," he told Mystique now. "He says it was clear that he was going to be 'huge' from before he was even two years old. And back then we didn't even know about Mutants like Azazel, Todd and Luke and Matthew, who were probably all born visibly mutated. But it wasn't like Shaw was making bad guesses or anything, even though they were guesses.

"But the other stuff didn't make sense at all. He talked like a scientist but he didn't seem to understand stuff I'd learned about science in primary school. Basic stuff about how genes worked, you know? I asked him, 'But what if the mutant gene is recessive, and all sorts of non-Mutants are carrying it around, the same way brown-haired people can carry the gene for blondness?' And he just looked at me blankly, for about half a second, and then he started talking about the atom bomb. I was sure I must have said something too stupid to even be worth talking about, but I couldn't figure out what I was missing "

"You couldn't make sense out of it because it didn't make sense," Erik said from behind them. Janos turned hurriedly toward the sound. Mystique did the same, but more slowly.

Erik was standing in the doorway. He was in his leather jacket, the collar zipped and turned up around his throat. "It's master race ideology with a Mutant twist," he went on. "It has nothing to do with science."

"I know that now," Janos said. "I was only telling her about before..."

"I understand that," Erik said. He turned to Mystique. "I'm going to make some phone calls. Someone will need to talk to Charles  he'll have seen the papers by now, doubtless. Do you want to come with me?"

Half an hour ago, Mystique had been nearly desperate to see her brother, but now the thought horrified her. She could not talk about what had happened at the jail with Charles. He would be so disappointed with her. He would sound hurt. She couldn't stand it.

But none of that was anything Mystique wanted to talk about with Erik at the moment, so she kept her face impassive. She pointed upward. "Kid's up the tree," she told him. "I can't leave."

Erik turned his own eyes upward. "Surely Azazel can get him down, if he won't come on his own?"

"He's playing," she said, and then added pointedly, "And I'm busy right now."

Erik shrugged indifferently, and went back inside the way he had come.

Janos was watching her with wide eyes. She shrugged at his unasked questions, an unconscious imitation of Erik's own movement.

"I'm so scared of him," Janos told her, his voice almost a whisper. Janos was not a little guy  he was in fact almost as tall as Erik  but when he said that, huddling down around the over-sized coat, she had the sense that he was much smaller and younger than he actually was. There was a sort of vulnerability to him now, that she never would have been able to imagine back during night at the CIA base.

Mystique was genuinely surprised by this statement. "Why?"

He shook his head. "I'm getting too far ahead in the story," he said.

They had been in port for about three weeks when Shaw had told them that they were shipping out for the United States. Alicia took this news without any reaction of her own, though Janos had seen his own astonishment reflected in her face. She took charge of the travel preparations, and porters had by the next day begun to make deliveries to the yacht.

A few days later, Janos had accompanied Shaw to an unassuming house in Buenos Aires, where he met with a group of men. They had used German almost exclusively during this conversation, and so Janos had not been able to follow along. There as nothing, after all, unusual about hearing German spoken inside many Argentinian homes. It had not entered his mind to think that these men were anything more than friends and colleagues of Shaw's... which, actually, was exactly what they were. It had only surprised Janos to see Shaw getting along on such friendly terms with humans.

Lots of people talked about how there were old Nazis hiding in Argentina, but Janos had hardly taken those stories seriously.

They had left before too long, and when they were back outside on the street Shaw had turned to him and said, "You are thinking that I shouldn't pal around with men like that."

Janos was still thinking of them as nothing more or less than normal people. He'd actually felt a great deal of relief to see that there were humans in the world who's company Shaw seemed to enjoy. It said to Janos that many of the things Shaw said about humans was only rhetoric, not anything he really meant. "It doesn't bother me at all," Janos said.

"But I wouldn't want you to take me for a Nazi," Shaw went on. He was walking a few steps ahead of Janos, and so thankfully hadn't seen the mystified expression that had come onto Janos's face at that. "Those men are simply useful to me. They understand about hierarchies. They know how to follow orders. That's why I keep them around." Alicia had told Janos more than once before that statements like these from Shaw were always either threats or warnings directed at the listener. He hadn't given that much credence when she told him that, but he was listening very closely to Shaw now.

"But I don't want you to make the mistake of thinking that I actually like human scum like that," Shaw went on, his tone professorial. "They still believe that they're very special, of course, but they're no better than any of the others. When it's our time to rise, they'll be ground under with all the rest."

He turned to look back at Janos. Janos was very glad that Alicia was not there to give his feelings away. "I'm hungry. Do you want to go get something to eat?"

Janos's heart had been beating very hard. He hardly heard himself say, "Whatever you want to do," over the roaring in his head.

When they'd gotten back to the yacht Alicia had told Shaw that the porters he'd hired had delivered some crates while they were gone, and that she had them put these crates in the hold. Shaw  thanked her.

Later that night, Janos woke up to find Alicia leading leaning over his bed, poking him firmly in the side with a finger. For once Raul was not with her.

"Don't be so shocked," Alicia told him. "I need to show you something. Get dressed and come with me."

He did what she told him, and had followed Alicia down into the ship's hold. There were some heavy-duty wooden crates down there, and Janos saw that the lid had been pried off the top of one of these crates.

Alicia closed the door of the hold behind them softly. "Go on," she said. "Look."

He did. The crate was full of neatly stacked gold bars, each one stamped with a swastika.

"You see now?" Alicia said. "You see the type of man we're dealing with? We're in a bad spot, right now, all three of us."

"There is a reasonable explanation for this," Janos said, when he found his voice again.

"You're lying to yourself," Alicia snapped at him. "You know that."

"I don't know anything," Janos said. The same sense of impotent helplessness that he had felt while he was waiting in the hospital for Arnau to die had come back upon him suddenly. He recognized that he had gotten himself into a monstrously bad situation, but he had no idea how correct matters.

"Stop it," she told him. "I can't think clearly when you feel like that."

"We can't fight him," Janos said. At that moment this seemed like a very pressing point to him. "He's too strong." He remembered how Shaw had taken the yacht out to sea so he could demonstrate his ability to Janos where they wouldn't be observed, and he remembered the roar and crackle of the fire as it had flown from Shaw's hands, the way the ocean had hissed when Shaw had steered the energy into the water.   

"We can run," Alicia countered. "We can leave, before it's too late."

"I " Janos began, but then he started over again. "He'd catch us."

"You're scared," Alicia said. "That's okay. Everybody gets scared. I'm scared. It's okay, as long as you don't let it make you into a coward."

That Janos was scared was a gross understatement. That Shaw could burn him to ashes with a touch was something that Janos supposed he had understood intellectually, but it was only now that the potentially of such a thing actually happening struck him. He'd never felt so terrified in his entire life.  

So what he said to Alicia was, "Don't do it. Please. He'll catch you."

But that night Alicia had gone, taking Raul with her.


	31. Chapter 31

_"It is not the number of victims or the degree of cruelty that is distinctive; it is the fact that the acts committed and the acts that nobody protests are split from the consciousness of men in an uncanny, even a schizophrenic manner. The atrocities of our time are done by men as 'functions' of social machinery  - men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the human beings who are their victims and, as well, their own humanity. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal. They are not sadistic but merely businesslike; they are not aggressive but merely efficient; they are not emotional at all but technically clean-cut." - C. Wright Mills_

_"If you feel expendable to the current power structure, it's because you are. All life is." - Waziyatawin_

* * *

Alicia and her boy left in the night, and the next morning Shaw went out into the city, and within two hours he returned to the yacht with the pair of them. Raul was in his arms. Janos supposed that this must have been how he'd been able to force Alicia to follow him back onto the ship without making a scene. She could not have hurt Shaw in the first place, but had she tried to resist there was nothing that he could not have done to the boy in retaliation.

Here Janos veered suddenly away from the narrative. Shaw was not, he insisted, a sadist. He did not take any special sort of pleasure from hurting other people. He might have been markedly less dangerous had this been the case. The real truth about Shaw was that he was absolutely indifferent to the harm that he did to others. Other people's pain did not matter to him in the slightest. It effected Shaw in no way, did not so much as touch him.

It was entirely impossible to reach such a person, or to convince him to do anything other than exactly what he had already decided to do.

"What happened?" Mystique heard herself ask.

The narrative now began to become disjointed. Janos spoke more quickly, but at the same time he struggled to find the correct words. He repeated himself, and his voice became uneven, at places ragged, and his accent thicker.

He had watched the three of them come on board the ship through the window of his cabin. Alicia's mouth was moving, but Janos could not hear what she was saying to Shaw. She was gesturing frantically, her fingers making small darting feints at the air, as though she wanted to snatch Raul away from Shaw but didn't quite dare.

Janos did not leave his cabin.

Shaw went into his own cabin, and when he came out again there was something in his free hand. Janos could not see what it was, but when Shaw showed it to Alicia all the color fled from her face.

Shaw was still carrying Raul. He opened the hatch to the ship's hold, and went down the stairs with the boy. Alicia followed.

Janos stayed in his cabin.

For a time, there was no sound but the faint murmur of voices coming up through the floorboards. He could not make out the words.

Janos laid down on his bed. He tried to think of something that he could do.

An idea struck him suddenly. Yes, Shaw was in contact with Nazis, and there was no doubt of that  it was possible even that he had been one, and that Alicia was right when she claimed that he was capable of doing unimaginable things. But whatever he may or may not have done in the past, those things would have been done to humans.

Shaw had made no secret that he cared nothing for humans, but he wouldn't hurt other Mutants  or at least, not too terribly. He had told Janos that all Mutants were family, after all, and therefore Shaw would not do anything irrevocable now. He was only doing this to frighten Alicia into line 

The sound of the gun firing came suddenly, muted by the walls of the hold but unmistakable, and Janos bit the insides of his own cheeks to keep from shouting. Then a sort of high keening had begun, and Janos had thought that it would never end.

Janos did not leave his cabin.

Sometime later, Shaw came back upstairs. Janos watched him through the window. There was nothing in his face or in the way that he carried himself that said anything remarkable had happened below deck. He went around to the bow of the ship, and a few minutes later they had begun to move out of port. If anyone outside of the ship had heard the shot being fired, they did not try to stop them.

Janos got up and went below went below deck. He met Alicia on the stairs, saw how his own guilt and grief and shame racked her face when she approached him, though before then her expression had been one of stoney and hallow-eyed determination.

He tried to say something, but found that he could not. She put her arms up as though to ward him off, and spat, "Don't put your shit on me. I've got enough of my own to deal with," and shoved past him on the stairs.

Janos continued down into the hold.

He'd done what he could to clean up the mess... to make things look right. It seemed to him that Shaw would have the expectation that someone would do this, and that it was in both his own and Alicia's interests that this should be taken care of as soon as possible.

It seemed very important that everything should be up to Shaw's expectations from now on.

"And I didn't want to leave the boy looking like that..." Janos told Mystique now, his gaze resting on the grave of the anonymous Mutant child. There had been so much blood, and he hadn't been used to seeing things like that at the time.

"This was how Shaw worked," Janos went on. "He talked about how we were all of the same blood, how we should stand together in solidarity to claim a bright future, and he'd use all of that to tear you away from your family and your past. I was lucky  really, I was  because I didn't have anyone left to lose so he couldn't hurt me that way. Alicia, though... and later  with Emma. And Erik.

"That's why he did what he did to Erik's mother, you know. I think Erik's still confused about that. He says that he understands what I mean, but I think he still thinks, 'If I could have done this or that thing differently...' or 'If I had been able to move that coin in time...' but none of that would have made any difference.

"Shaw didn't want him to have anyone else he could turn to, anyone who loved him. That was all. He wanted Erik to be completely isolated, completely dependent on him.

"It was all about control  everything with Shaw was about control. It didn't even have that much to do with his mother being human, or even a Jew. If she'd been a Mutant too, he still would have killed one of them, so he could have had complete control over the other. I think that if he'd ever met Luke and Matthew, he would have found a way to put Luke out of the picture, so Matthew would be all his.

"That was how Shaw worked," Janos said again.

Janos supposed that Shaw had gotten the answer to his question. Alicia had felt someone else's death, and lived through it.

But that was not exactly how things turned out.

Janos had stayed down in the hold for hours. The truth was that he had been frightened to go back up, afraid that if he saw Shaw his rage would boil over and he would do or say something that would provoke the other man into hurting him. He was ashamed, too, for his inaction and cowardice, and did not know how he could possibly face Alicia.

It was dark by the time he went up on deck again, and they were sailing in open water. He'd slunk off into his own cabin. At some point in the night, he fell asleep.

The next morning, Janos laid in his bed for a long time, trying to figure out what he should do next. The best thing to do with Shaw, he decided, would be to pretend that nothing whatsoever had happened. That would be safest.

He did not know how to handle Alicia, but thought that he would figure it out after he saw how she was dealing with the situation. Except that he never saw Alicia again.

At first he thought that she was inside her cabin, or maybe hiding somewhere else on the ship, but days went by and she never reappeared. He watched food supplies in the ship's gallery, but no one was taking anything except himself and Shaw. The lifeboat was still hanging where it belonged, so she had not gotten away that way. Eventually, Janos began to search the ship, going over every inch, excluding Shaw's cabin which he would not have dared to set foot in, but he finally had to conclude that she was gone.

Shaw said nothing about Alicia, but he seemed... not exactly angry, because Alicia had been right when she said that he didn't get angry. But somehow annoyed with the state of things.

That was why Janos believed that Alicia had thrown herself overboard and into the sea. It was possible that Shaw had killed her while Janos was in the hold or sleeping in his room, but Janos didn't believe that. He thought that Shaw had intended to keep Alicia around, and he was unhappy because she'd found a way to get away from him.

In a way, he was happy for her. It seemed to him that Alicia had won a victory over Shaw, in denying him the ability to control her life.

But jumping overboard was never an option to Janos. He had wanted very much to stay alive.

That was why Janos continued to work so hard to be exactly what Shaw wanted him to be. When things had begun, he had apprenticed himself to Shaw out of something like love  a painfully naïve attachment to an older man whom he'd believed would fill the void where his own father should have been. Now it was only fear, and Janos had no doubt as to which of these emotions were stronger.

Shaw liked to use other Mutants as enforcers. He would have them  Janos and the ones who came later  display their abilities in a way that that frightened humans into doing what he wanted. Janos felt like a freak on display when he did this, and like a vile bully, but he did it because Shaw wanted it and because he did not want to end up like Raul. Shaw almost never showed off his own powers like this, so Janos supposed that he understood very well how demeaning it was.

But Shaw wanted it, so Janos learned how to threaten people, how to be menacing on command. He practiced in front of a mirror for hours, until he was able to expel all signs of softness or fear from his expression, no matter what the situation. He found a way to make his eyes look dangerously mad, and after a while they began to look at way all the time. That had frightened him, but it was  like everything else in his life  something that was outside of his own control.

Shaw was in control. Always. Shaw had all the power, and Janos was nothing more than a leaf in the wind. He did what he was told.

He learned how to hurt other people, and how to act as though he absolutely did not care when he did so. He learned to kill, too  intentionally, not like what had happened to Arnau  and the trick to that, he told Mystique, was to absolutely not think about what you were doing as you did it. But this would come later, after Emma and Azazel had joined them.

The ship sailed on, and eventually they'd come to port in Miami, Florida.

They'd docked, and in the hour before he'd stepped off the yacht, Shaw had in some indefinable but undeniable way, stopped being Argentinian and had become American. He changed the way he dressed, yes, dawning suits of a subtly different cut, but the change was more in the way he wore his clothing, in the way he moved and held himself and gestured with his hands.

It was true that Janos had spoken with only two or three Americans in his life, but he had seen any number of American films, and from what little he knew the change in Shaw seemed to be absolutely authentic. It was also true that he did not at the time speak English, but it seemed to him that he could hear no hint of Spanish or German in Shaw's English.

"Erik can do the same thing, I guess," Mystique said. She felt a little uneasy making the comparison.

Janos nodded. "Yes, I would never have thought that he was anything but American if I hadn't been told otherwise."

"He sounds a little Irish, when he's tired or upset or tipsy," Mystique said. "But I never would have thought German."

Janos shrugged. "I don't hear accents in English so well, I guess," he said.

"It's very faint," Mystique said. "And actually, it's almost faded away completely now."

"Erik doesn't think Shaw was really German, did you know that?"

Mystique shook her head. "No, he didn't tell me that. Why does he think that?"

Janos shrugged again, uneasily this time. "Maybe I shouldn't be talking about it... I don't want him to think I repeat things to people."

"Hm," Mystique said.

"If you ask him, I'm sure he'll tell you..." Janos said. "He's got pictures and things like that. If Erik's right, Shaw was old."

"How old?"

"Very old," he said again, and went on with the story.

It was only when they came to the United States that Shaw began to go by that name. He'd obviously come to Miami with some purpose in mind, but he didn't share his plans with Janos and Janos certainly didn't ask.

A few weeks after they arrived in Florida, Shaw brought someone else back to the yacht with him. Shaw introduced her to Janos as Emma Frost. He explained to Janos that she was a telepath, and when he said this Janos saw in Shaw the same satisfaction at having made a novel discovery that he had shown over Janos when they had first met.

Emma stood very close to Shaw as he spoke, her eyes downcast in a way that was almost bashful. She was a young woman, no more than seventeen, and very pretty, Janos supposed, though she was not his type.

Her eyes had snapped up to focus on him when he thought this, and a voice had spoken in his head, _Not your type? That's awful presumptuous of you, isn't it?_

The voice in his head had spoken in Spanish  had in fact used his own dialect exactly  but when Janos tried to stammer out an apology it became obvious that Emma did not understand him.

A few days later, Emma would approach him while Shaw was away from the yacht. Teach me Spanish, she told, speaking telepathically again. He would puzzle long and hard over how their brains translated these thoughts between themselves, but would never really figure it out.

He had agreed uncertainly, because he did not picture himself as a teacher and really had no idea where to begin. But Emma had her own ideas about how to proceed.

She set him down at a gallery table and placed herself across from him. Then she spent about three hours staring at Janos intently, her mouth moving quickly and almost noiselessly as she picked her way through his brain, drawing out vocabulary and working her way through grammar.

When she was finished with this, she'd asked him in completely flawless Spanish if he also knew Catalan.

He supposed that she knew the answer to that already, but he'd replied, "Just enough for market days and conversations." He added ruefully, trying not to seem too envious over the fact that her ability made this so easy for her, "I'm not very good with languages."

"Give me what you have of that, too," she said, and so they'd sat there for another half an hour, until she was satisfied that she'd gotten what he could give her.

Janos had gotten a terrible headache after all of this was over, but that had been the end of their communication barrier, at least so far as speech went.

Emma could flare up in an instant if you said or thought the wrong thing around her, but most of the time she was taciturn, even shy  or, at least that had been the case when she first joined them, though this would begin to change very quickly. He saw so much of himself as he had been before Arnau's death in her, that same wounded and defiant pride. That made him sad. It also made him worry for her.

It seemed to Janos that he could every day see more and more the effect of Shaw's attention on her. He drew her out of her shell at the same time he drew her into his own orbit, under his control. Sometimes he would listen to the way Shaw spoke to her  not the words, because they spoke English between each other most of the time and Janos could not understand them, but the tone  and would watch the way Shaw looked at her, with that intense and personal gaze that seemed to collapse all the barriers between the two of them, and he would almost feel again that faith in the future and in Shaw that he had felt when they'd first met. This was madness  he knew very well what a lie it was  and yet the feeling would come upon him and he would rage against himself for it.

Janos recognized now that Shaw had worked a type of seduction of on him, and when he thought about the way he had been tricked he hated Shaw almost as much as he feared him.

But he did not understand how it could be possible that Emma  a telepath  might be tricked the same way that Janos had been fooled. Did Shaw have some way of hiding things from her, what he'd done to Raul and Alicia and whatever else might have been in his past or in his plans for the future, or did she know and not care? To this day, Janos did not know the answer to this question.

Shaw and Emma would sometimes disappear from the ship for days at a time, and sometimes during these extended absences Janos would contemplate running. But he had very little English and no papers  Shaw had taken his passport  and Miami frightened him.

Back home, there had always been the danger of running afoul of the _Guardia Civil_  the state police  who were known to on occasion engage in torture or to even make people disappear. Franco's Spain was not the Third Reich, but you had to know where the lines were. Still, if you understood the rules and didn't say or do anything stupid it was fairly easy to avoid that type of negative government attention.

The problem with Miami was that the rules were to him incomprehensible. In fact, he was not at all sure that there were any rules, though there were certainly consequences for being caught in violation of them.

In Spain, the danger was in having the wrong politics or in coming from the wrong region. In America, it seemed more and more true to him that the biggest danger laid in having the wrong skin.

They had not really thought of things in those terms where he had come from, but had Janos been asked before he'd been brought to Miami, he would have have said that he was white. Tan, yes, but white. Iberian. European. But he learned very quickly that he had been somehow wrong about this.

There were fault-lines everywhere, but he was not qualified to judge where they were. Before Emma joined them, Shaw had sent him into the city alone a few times, and Janos had bumbled through these errands in a low-grade panic. It seemed to him that everywhere he went, hostile eyes followed him. At first, he had wanted to tell himself that this was simply because he annoyed people with his lack of English, with his inept pantomiming and baffled silence in the face of questions or directions, but that was not it.

Eventually and with Emma's help, he worked out that the anglos despised him because they believed that he was a Cuban (a fact which did not really explain anything, because it did nothing to account for their animosity toward Cubans). For the same reason, the American Negros mistrusted him. Of course, the Cubans had no such difficulties recognizing that he was not one of their number, and were at best cool toward him.

Later, after Emma had come to stay on the yacht, she would insist that he accompanied her when she went into Miami. She told him that it wasn't safe for a young woman walk alone in the city, but this was patently absurd for two reasons.

First of all, Emma was entirely capable of sending anyone who attempted to harm her into the deepest reaches of his own personal mental hell. Secondly, it was absolutely obvious that they attracted more negative attention together than she ever would have alone.

When Shaw wasn't with them, Emma would often attach herself to Janos's arm when they were out in public. This made Janos deeply uncomfortable, because by then it was obvious that Emma and Shaw were sleeping together, and he had no idea what Shaw would do if he happened to see Janos touching his girl like that, but by then it had seemed to Janos that Emma was almost as dangerous as Shaw was, so he hadn't really dared to tell her no.

One day they'd been in a supermarket, Janos pushing a grocery cart with Emma perched on his arm, her head resting against his shoulder as though there was nothing in the world that made her happier than just being near him. And she said, with no inflection whatsoever, "The man who's walking behind us is thinking about killing you."

He'd been stiff before, but now Janos felt every muscle in his body go absolutely taunt with alarm.

"Don't worry so much," Emma had said, nuzzling up a little closer to him. "It's not as though you couldn't stop him."

Janos supposed he understood that intellectually, but violence would never be his first instinct, no matter how accomplished a killer Shaw would make him later. At the time, his first feelings had been hurt and puzzlement. "Why's he thinking that?" he asked, frowning. He did not quite dare to look back at the man.

"Because he's taken you for a Negro," Emma said.

This answer astonished Janos so much that he'd nearly laughed. He didn't care about the mistake  there was, certainly, nothing wrong with being a Negro and he was not insulted on that front  but it seemed impossible to him that anyone could be stupid enough to make such a transparently obvious error.

Then he'd remembered what she'd said about the man wanting to kill him, and he'd felt once again deeply troubled. "But why " he began. He looked back, trying to find the man Emma was speaking of. There were several anglo men down the aisle, and a couple of them returned his brief glance with decidedly unfriendly expressions, but he could sense murder in none of their eyes.

"Because you're touching me," Emma said. She paused for only a beat, and then she added, "He's also thinking about how he wants to rape me. It's odd, how often those two types of thoughts seem to go hand in hand."

"I wish you wouldn't do this," Janos said.

"You know I'm telling the truth," Emma said, and that was true. Emma lied all the time  she said that no one else ever told the truth, so she didn't see any reason why she should do any differently  but Janos knew she wasn't lying now. That was why he hated what she was telling him so much.

"Men think about raping me all the time," Emma went on, almost flippantly. "On a day like this  simple, short shopping trip in the city  I might hear six or eight different men think it.

"I can hear what you're thinking now," she went on, voice precise and measured, "and it doesn't make any difference how I dress. For a while, I made the mistake of thinking that might be a factor, too. So I tried wearing ankle-length skirts and ratty old sweaters, I even stopped doing my makeup and washing my hair. But none of that changed anything. It's not because I'm pretty, either  they think the same things about ugly girls, just as often.

"It has absolutely nothing to do with what I do, you see. It's all them. They hate themselves because they're weak. They can't feel better unless they have power over someone else, that's all."

'They,' Janos understood, for this was a common theme of Emma's, did not mean the men who had the ugly thoughts, nor even all men. It meant humans.

The two of them would walk down the street, and she would give him a constant narration of the sins of the people who passed by. "That one cheated on his exams, his taxes, her husband," she would say. "He robbed a gas station.

"She stole her grandmother's engagement ring. The ring was the only thing the old woman had left from the old country, and the girl knows that but it doesn't matter to her.

"That man was the ringleader in a lynching twenty years ago, in Georgia. He knows the man they killed was innocent, but he doesn't care. It's his proudest memory.

"That one isn't a molester yet, but he has aspirations.

"This man isn't just a dreamer. He's already raped three women."

Emma would ask him sometimes if he thought she should do something to punish these people. Janos decided from the beginning that it would be safest to refuse to answer that type of question. "It doesn't matter," was all he'd said. It would be something he'd say a lot, in the coming years.

It didn't stop with the thoughts of the people they saw in the street. Emma could not pass by a "No Negros" sign without drawing his attention to it, and these were all over the place. She took them out of their way to point out to Janos the beaches with posted rules that involved "No Latins," or the apartment buildings with the signs that read, "No children, No dogs, No Cubans."

To her, it was all ammunition. It only proved a point.

"They imagine that they are unique, every single one of them," Emma would tell him. "And yet they despise any scrap of difference in others. That's why they hate each other so much. That's why they'll try to destroy us, as soon as they realize we exist. And that's why we'll have to kill them first."

At the time, Janos had still taken statements like these to be at most wishful thinking on the part of Shaw and Emma.

The hell of it was, he never knew how to argue against Emma's claims. There was no denying the racism and hatred and cruelty and violence that permeated human society. She was not lying, but neither did he believe that she was telling the whole truth.

"What do you care then," he'd snapped at her, out of sheer, heedless frustration, "if a man rapes a woman  if one person does anything to hurt another person  if you just mean to kill all of the victims with the attackers?" He had, for a long time, resisted referring to non-Mutants as humans or Homo sapiens. He did not at the time accept that he was not human; he still didn't believe this, he told Mystique now, though he recognized that there were many people who would not recognize the humaness of Mutants.

"I don't care about the victims," Emma said, and now Janos was pretty sure she was lying. Or at least, he hoped she was. "The victims aren't the point. The point is, whatever they do to themselves, they'll do ten times worse to us if we give them the chance."

He'd stopped on the sidewalk, pulling his arm away from hers. "Mutants do bad things, too," he said to her. "I've done bad things."

Emma faced him, smirking. "Arnau?" she said. "He provoked you. He deserved nothing less than what he got."

"You shut up," he told her. He had not told anyone about Arnau  she was the only one he'd told about that, Janos said to Mystique now  and he was outraged that Emma had seized on this memory to build up her nasty little argument. The people on the street were staring at them, but Janos did not care. "You shut up about things you don't understand."

"But I understand it perfectly," Emma said back. "Everything about Arnau proves exactly what I've been saying."

Janos felt his hand draw back.

"If you hit me, you'll wish you never had," Emma told him. Janos's fist fell, slowly, back to his side.

When Emma went on, she spoke in a voice that was entirely reasonable. "Anyway, there's no crime or sin in a Mutant hurting a human, anymore than there is in exterminating rats when they invade your home. And if Mutants do think or do violent things, even to other Mutants, it's because of the corrupting influences of humans. They're brutal and greedy and selfish. They're practically animals  if you had my ability, you would understand that I'm right. We'll only have peace when they're gone.

"I am explaining this to you for your own good. Everything that's coming will be much easier for you when you accept that this is true."

"Oh, I see it all now," Janos bit back at her sarcastically. He did not often forget his fear, but at the moment Emma had exposed the conclusions of her philosophy to be so ludicrous that he could in no way take her seriously. "It's all become completely obvious to me, thanks to you. The bad humans made Shaw kill Raul. They caused him to drive Alicia to suicide. Shaw had no choice in any of this, he was simply under the corrupting influences of the humans. Yes, that makes perfect sense."

Emma didn't answer him. She rolled her eyes, as though what he'd said wasn't even worth considering, but there was something in her face that told Janos that he had rattled her. That did not feel as good as he might have hoped it would.

He could see how badly she thought she needed to believe in Shaw. That was why he twisted the knife. "If you know all about Arnau, I suppose it's impossible that you do not know about those two. So how do you justify that? Where in the big picture does murdering the child of a frightened woman  a frightened Mutant woman  in front of her?"

Emma didn't answer, so he went on, "Have you considered the possibility that Shaw might do exactly the same thing to you someday? How are you any different from Alicia? We're all Mutants, right? Isn't that what Shaw says?"

"Oh, that's simple. I'm different because I'm useful to him," Emma said, and Janos decided at that moment that he could not explain away Emma's support for Shaw with the idea that she didn't understand what he was about.

Emma turned her back on him. "You, on the other hand," she added as she began to walk away, "should be more careful. You aren't nearly as special or as clever as you think you are."

After a few moments, Janos began to follow her. He was not, even after all that, brave enough to try to run away.

Anyway, there was no place on Earth where he could hide that Shaw wouldn't be able to find him.

Janos hesitated now, looking at Mystique's face searchingly. "Because he had Azazel," Mystique said.

"Yeah," Janos agreed. He was still watching her hard.

"I'm not going to get angry with you for telling me how things happened," she told him.

So Janos went on.


	32. Chapter 32

_"We're so self-important. So arrogant. Everybody's going to save something now. Save the trees, save the bees, save the whales, save the snails. And the supreme arrogance? Save the planet! Are these people kidding? Save the planet? We don't even know how to take care of ourselves; we haven't learned how to care for one another. We're gonna save the fuckin' planet? . . . And, by the way, there's nothing wrong with the planet in the first place. The planet is fine. The people are fucked! Compared with the people, the planet is doin' great. It's been here over four billion years . . . The planet isn't goin' anywhere, folks. We are! We're goin' away. Pack your shit, we're goin' away. And we won't leave much of a trace. Thank God for that. Nothing left. Maybe a little Styrofoam. The planet will be here, and we'll be gone. Another failed mutation; another closed-end biological mistake." - George Carlin_

* * *

Janos had been vaguely aware of the existence of Azazel for several months before they actually met, but for a long time Azazel had been a nonentity, nothing more than a name which Emma occasionally mentioned, normally with tones of derision.

Emma spoke of Azazel as though he was an undependable and naïve sort of person, and so when he finally appeared on the on the yacht  suddenly and with a cloud of smoke  Janos was astonished by him. He'd expected someone much younger, he supposed, and someone less imposing.

Also, Emma hadn't mentioned anything about his appearance. It was, Janos admitted now, the first time he'd seen someone with a visible mutation.

Janos was more than a little frightened of Azazel from the beginning. He looked scary, and not just because of the red skin or the dagger-tipped tail or the uncanny resemblance to a demon. He had a rough face, the sort of face which at first glance seemed designed for cruelty. There was a distance in those eerily pale blue eyes that made it impossible for Janos to believe that they saw the world on the same terms that he did. The scars were ugly and hard to look at 

Janos paused suddenly in his story, as though he'd only just remembered to take into account Mystique's own unconventional appearance and her relationship with Azazel. "I don't mean to say anything bad."

Over the last hour, he'd already said half a dozen things that Mystique wanted to argue with, and his views on Azazel's scars was the least of it. The more Janos's spoke, the more she saw in him a type of ambivalence toward his own mutation and the entire concept of Mutant solidarity and the Brotherhood. He was sounding quite a lot like Remy, actually, and that troubled Mystique because she did not believe that Janos and his experiences could be dismissed as easily as Remy's opinions could be.

She could sense a threat to everything that they were trying so ineptly to build here, in this type of talk. But it seemed to her safer to know exactly what was on his mind, and so she decided not to say anything that might cause Janos to censor himself more than he was already. "Don't worry about it. Just say what you think."

"That's an old bad habit of mine," Janos said to his feet. "Saying what I think. Maybe I shouldn't pick it up again."

"You're fine," Mystique told him, and she supposed Janos believed her, because he went on.

When Azazel arrived on the deck of the yacht that first time, Emma and Shaw came out of their cabin briefly to greet him  Shaw cheerfully and Emma with something between indifference and annoyance  but shortly thereafter they went inside again, leaving Janos alone with the very strange stranger.

Emma had spoke to Azazel with English, which Azazel seemed to understand only marginally better than Janos did. Shaw spoke in a Russian which was (Azazel would confide to Janos later) so dreadfully bad as to be almost incomprehensible. So Janos was surprised when Azazel proved to be in command of a nearly faultless Spanish of almost the same dialect which Janos had grown up speaking.

That had provoked obvious questions, and before long Azazel was telling him the story of his life  or parts of it, anyway. He spoke with great fondness of Spain, and this made Janos feel self-conscious in a way that was oddly pleasant, though as Azazel went on the homesickness that had been plaguing Janos began to grip him more painfully.

Aside from the matter of Arnau's death (which would forever stick out in Janos's mind as the worst thing that had ever happened to him and the worst thing that he'd ever done, no matter how many times he killed deliberately to stay on Shaw's good side) everything about the past had in retrospect begun to take on a nostalgic glow. The bullying and beatings to which his brothers had subjected him seemed like nothing compared to life under Shaw's shadow. The idea of a boring and unimportant life on the family orange farm had begun to seem like a comparative paradise.

Early into their discussion, Azazel excused himself and disappeared with a sudden plum of red and black smoke. Janos was left alone on the deck of the yacht, wide-eyed and blinking, but Azazel reappeared almost as quickly as he'd left, returning with a bottle of _Anís del Toro_  bull's anisette  in his hand.

The _anís_ was a serious drink, but Azazel seemed to see no necessity in diluting it; he had not even bothered with glasses, apparently content to pass the bottle. Later, when Azazel began to talk about his time with the _Brigadas Internacionales_ , Janos would understand from whom Azazel had gotten the idea that this was proper etiquette.

Janos was uneasy about the prospect of drinking. His hatred for Shaw rested like a cyanide pill on the tip of his tongue all of the time. He was constantly sensitive to its presence, aware that if he allowed the poisonous rage to break free it would mean nothing more or less than his own death.

But Azazel was insistent, and there was a sort of friendly earnestness to him at moments like that which made it very difficult to tell him no. Azazel was not, Janos would find, a social creature, but occasionally he did enjoy socializing, and at those times it was very important to him that things be done correctly.

And after all, they had a fine time, right up until the end, when Janos nervously pointed out the error with Franco and Azazel exploded in the worst and only fit of temper Janos ever saw him display, pacing the deck like a caged tiger and cursing himself as a fool in no less than four different languages.

It might have been funny, if Janos hadn't still been a little afraid of him, and if the shortsightedness of Azazel and his commanding officers hadn't had such an immediate and negative effect on his own life.

It was almost dangerous to wonder how differently everything might have turned out if Azazel had thought to use his abilities to bring a swift end to the civil war. What would it have meant for Janos and his brothers, had they had grown up with a father? What would it have meant for the entire world, had the fascist government in Spain been effectively snuffed out?

He couldn't allow himself to dwell too long on these questions; they would only fester if he picked at them. Had conditions been more normal Janos knew it might have been very easy for him hate Azazel for everything he hadn't done, but things were not normal and instead Janos found himself warming toward the other man very quickly.

Janos supposed that much of this had to do with the fact that he had up until Azazel's arrival been badly lonely, but that wasn't the only reason; Azazel might have been difficult to understand, but he was easy to like, if you could overlook a few things. He was friendly  funny, even, in a grave and almost awkward way.

Janos was no longer in the market for a father figure and did not believe, after what he had done to Arnau, that he deserved a new older brother. But there was something about being called "comrade" that touched Janos in a way that was almost painful  a type of longing for the support and respect that Shaw had promised but which had turned out to be such a calculated lie.

He understood before very long that the word _comrade_ was a sort of private joke to Azazel, but because all of Azazel's jokes were at their heart serious and absolutely sincere, he felt that this robbed the word of none of its power or sentiment.

So he liked Azazel, despite his sense of unease and the distrust in others and in his own judgment that he'd developed after having been taken in so thoroughly by Shaw. But he did not feel himself free to speak frankly with Azazel  not even while drunk. The possibility of something getting back to Shaw was always there, freezing Janos's tongue in his mouth.

The problem was that Janos was never sure where Azazel stood on the matter of Shaw. He would sit listening silently to Shaw and Emma and Azazel as they discussed the future and their plans, his own face carefully impassive, nodding along when it was expected of him.

At first, Janos had been frightened for Azazel's sake over the number of questions he asked Shaw, the way Azazel corrected him when he thought Shaw was in error. Even before Janos had known what Shaw was, he hadn't dared to speak up to him like that, but Azazel acted as though he really believed that he and Shaw were on the same level  as though he thought that they were all, in fact, equals. Janos had wanted to warn him against those types of delusions, to tell him how little Shaw really cared for other Mutants and how dangerous he could be if crossed... but after a while he began to realized that Shaw didn't represent the same danger to Azazel that he did to Janos.

Janos began to understand this around the same time that he began to really _think_ about Azazel's ability, about how little danger actually existed in the world for someone who could do what Azazel could do. And once he saw that, he began to understand why the rules were different for Azazel, why Shaw would never show his true face to Azazel, would never attempt to terrorize or dominate him with the threat of violence. Such tactics had proved highly effect in his own case, Janos was ashamed to admit  Shaw had quashed in him any thought of rebellion or defiance  but it never would have worked with Azazel.

Had Azazel felt threatened or disrespected he could just leave, and it was as simple as that. He could go anywhere in the world any time he wanted, and he'd never have to worry about Shaw tracking him down again. He was absolutely free in ways that perhaps no person without Azazel's ability could really appreciate; Janos himself could hardly visualize it, though perhaps that was because he'd gotten so used to living his life as a prisoner.

Janos had to be careful, but the rules were different for Azazel. Azazel could argue with Shaw, because Shaw need him and because there was really no way for Shaw to hurt him. He couldn't be held with force  he could leave any time he wanted, and no one would be able to track him down, so for Azazel Shaw used different tactics. He charmed Azazel, the same way he had at first charmed Janos. Azazel was not possessed by the sort of desperate need for approval that had lead Janos to walk into Shaw's trap with both eyes open, but he clearly didn't mind complements, either, and Shaw laid them on thick.

Shaw treated Azazel as though he was vitally important to everything that the Hellfire Club was trying to do, and Janos supposed that wasn't even a lie; unlike Janos, who couldn't do anything for Shaw that Shaw couldn't do himself, Azazel was indispensable. Shaw spoke in grand terms, about remaking the world and seizing the future for Mutantkind, and though Azazel never seemed too concerned with the specifics, it was clear to Janos the idea of working toward something together  of being part of something bigger than himself  appealed very much Azazel.

Well, it wasn't like Janos didn't understand the feeling.

It wasn't as though Azazel didn't question Shaw, but  stupid as Janos had since become convinced Shaw was  he was a master rhetorician. His time with the Brigadas aside, it was clear that Azazel hadn't had much experience with basic person-to-person conversations, never mind holding his own in a debate against someone who seemed as certain about everything as Shaw. He never stood a chance against Shaw's ability to spin heroic yarns and launch winged words.

The end result of all this was that Azazel took the fact that Shaw knew what he was doing on faith, and almost always went along with what Shaw asked him to do. And in actuality, Janos supposed that from Azazel's prospective Shaw didn't ask that much of him. Transportation from one point to another, or some killing.

Azazel didn't mind killing, Janos told Mystique now, his voice dropping as though delivering bad news; Mystique couldn't understand how it was he could think that he was telling her something she hadn't already known. The happiest time of Azazel's life had been when he'd been a partisan in the Brigadas, and he was glad to fighting again for a cause and for his comrades.

It was unnerving to see how readily Azazel would throw himself into this type of work. His talent for the slaughter. The unabashed enjoyment he took from it. All it took was for Shaw to point him toward some group of "enemies," and the result was less a battle than pure butchery.

Still, Azazel was by no means an ideologue. The finer points in the Mutant-human conflict seemed to matter to Azazel little more than the actual distinctions between the republicanos and the nacionales had during the civil war. He would listen to Shaw's rhetoric, his chin held high, nodding gravely from time to time, and when asked would go off and kill whoever Shaw wanted killed with unmitigated cruelty, but he seemed either disinclined or incapable of universalize the concept of all humans as enemy. He still spoke fondly of his comrades from the war  though often with the hurt of betrayal, because they had stopped fighting long before they had finished killing all of the fascists  and seemed to see no contradiction in comparing humans he had known to members of the Hellfire Club.

Nor was Azazel, even after joining Shaw, uniformly vicious toward all humans. He'd gotten particularly attached to one  an American named Colonel Henry  shortly before everything that had happened in Cuba. He seemed to have a certain degree of pity for the man, strangely enough, and had gone so far as to call him "comrade" as a means of reassuring him.

Shaw had been careful when he decided that it was time to kill Henry  he'd made sure Azazel was away when it happened.

He actually intended that Janos should do it, but Janos hadn't wanted for a whole host of reasons. In Janos's estimation Henry was a coward who'd sold his own kind out in an attempt to save his own skin, so in that he and Janos had something in common. And he didn't like killing in general, though by then he'd become fairly resigned to the fact that what he liked or didn't like meant exactly nothing in the big scheme of things.

But the main thing was that he didn't know what Azazel would do if he found out Henry had been killed. And he had a pretty good idea that Shaw didn't know, either, and that was why Janos had been told to do it; if Azazel found out later and decided to take issue over the matter  and it seemed likely that he would, Azazel was protective of all of his "comrades"  Janos might be made to shoulder the blame, and nothing of value would be lost. He figured he was being set up almost as blatantly as Henry himself.

In the end, Henry had try to pull a trick, and Shaw hadn't been able to resist the opportunity to show off, so that was one murder that wasn't on Janos's hands.

He'd been relieved about that, as selfish as the feeling was. Janos didn't know how much it would take for him to end up on the wrong side of Azazel's blades, and he didn't want to find out, but the main issue was more fundamental than that.

Azazel had been good friend to him. At the time he was, in fact, the only person who seemed to sincerely care if Janos lived or died. Janos didn't want to do him wrong by killing someone who  for whatever dubious reasons  Azazel had decided to like.

Janos paused, and Mystique waited. Finally, he said, "I shouldn't have said all that, but you're too easy to talk to. He's never asked about what happened to Henry, so maybe he's forgotten about him. Maybe he hasn't noticed that he's dead, or didn't think to connect it with Shaw."

He kicked at the dead leaves by his feet. A few of them flew into the air, and his hand came up, fingers twitching anxiously as he kept the leaves spinning in the air. He looked up at her, almost belligerently, and said, "But maybe now you'll go and tell him."

"I don't see any reason why I should do that," Mystique said carefully, wondering if that was a lie even as she said it. "But if I did, Janos, I don't think it would matter. You weren't the one who did it "

"No, but I would have, if things had gone differently. I always did what Shaw told me to. I can't even remember how many people I've killed because Shaw told me to. I've lost count. Maybe it's a hundred  maybe more. I don't know. It might have been billions, if Erik hadn't done something to stop it." He was on his feet, pacing back and forth in front of the bench. His voice had grown no louder, but it broiled with anger.

Mystique heard a rustling in the branches overhead, and saw Todd  or whatever his name was  peering down apprehensively from among the leaves.

She hunted for something that she might say to calm him down, if only for the sake of relieving the boy's fear  and her own. "Janos, what else could you have done? You didn't have control of the situation. You're not responsible "

It was not the right thing to say  she recognized that even as she said it  and he wheeled on her. Sitting there listening to him speak in that hesitant and shy little voice for the last two hours she had forgotten, somehow, that she knew he was dangerous. But she remembered now.

"If I wish for you to make excuses for my actions, I will ask. You understand this?" It seemed wisest to nod. "No, I was not in control of the situation, but there were things I could have done. I could have died  on principle I could have died. Or for my pride, if I had any worth mentioning."

A strong wind began to rise in the courtyard. "You are, right now, dangerously close to making your brother's mistake. I could have sunk the yacht, and that might have robbed Shaw of Emma and her talents, even if Shaw himself would not have drowned. I am insignificant, but I might have in the very least inconvenienced Shaw. I could have tried to convince Azazel that Shaw was "

" _Janos_ ," she cut in sharply when she heard the limbs of the tree begin to creak. "You will throw the kid from the branches if you don't stop right now."

The wind died instantly.

She watched the color drain from his face as Janos staggered back to the bench like someone anticipating a fainting spell. He sank down heavily beside her, and she scooted away from him, angry and still more than a little afraid.

They both looked upwards, and saw that the boy was clinging masterfully to the still swaying branches, but that his eyes were large and fearful. Mystique thought that she saw a type of disappointment in those eyes. He's too used to adults fighting in front of him, she thought.

The same idea seemed to have occurred to Janos, because he called up in a falsely carefree tone, "It's alright  don't worry. We're just playing a silly game down here. You didn't get shaken up too badly, did you?"

Mystique wondered who he thought he was fooling. Not the boy, certainly, who disappeared back into the branches without comment. She supposed he wouldn't be coming down on his own any time soon, now  probably she'd have climb up there and get him eventually, or else have Azazel to do it, as Erik had suggested.

"I'm sorry," Janos said, more softly. "I'm better than I was... before. But I am not well."

"Who is, anyway?" she said, trying to be flippant.

"Azazel," he said promptly. "Azazel was too crazy to begin with to ever go nuts."

Mystique snorted, despite herself. _Something's wrong with me  I'm the crazy one,_ she thought, but then she was laughing wild, pounding on her leg with a balled fist as the spasms shook her. Janos turned to stare at her, wide-eyed, and she pressed her face against his shoulder, stifling her giggles against his coat's ridiculous fur ruff.

"Are you okay?" Janos said, squirming uneasily beneath her.

"No," she said, lifting her face. She swiped quickly at her eyes, brushing the tears away. "Probably not." _I almost killed a man yesterday, she thought. I probably would have, if I hadn't over-thought it. That happened, and now I've been sitting here listening to a murder pour out years of pain like he's vomiting poison, and where exactly is the funny in all of that?_

Mystique didn't know, and as soon as she tried to put a figure on the funny it fled completely, leaving her feeling simply drained. She settled her clenched hands in her lap and sat staring at them, embarrassed for herself and for Janos. After a while, she asked him, "Will you go on, please?"

He did, but now his story had skipped back in time, to shortly after he met Azazel, to the first time he'd killed a man under Shaw's orders.

Despite what had happened to Arnau, using his ability to hurt others was not something that came innately to Janos, and how to do it wasn't immediately obvious. Later, when he'd had more practice  after he'd done it again and again and again  he'd find different ways to do it. Bodies could be torn apart in a tornado. They could be lifted into the sky and flung down violently enough to break them against the ground, and that was the best way because he didn't have to see the landings, and because he could believe that the individuals subjected to this sometimes managed to survive. (Mystique remembered now that the very few agents to survive the night raid on the CIA base were those who'd happened to land somewhere relatively soft when thrown from Janos's whirlwinds, and who were either badly injured enough to pass for dead or sensible enough to fake it  Shaw and Azazel hadn't been nearly as sloppy  but at the moment she couldn't seem to find her voice to mention that). With a single individual, Janos went on flatly, there was a way to engulf a person in a small whirlwind that would suck away all the breathable air, and that seemed kinder  or at least, the violence was less overt  but sometimes they would look at him, and he didn't 

"Stop," Mystique said, balling her hands more tightly in her lap to resist the urge to clutch at her own throat. It was only her imagination  she knew that  that caused her to feel as though she couldn't get enough air, but she didn't think she could listen to any more about it.

He did, but only briefly. It seemed to Mystique that something had hemorrhaged in Janos, that it would have been impossible, now, for him to stop. The best he could do, when he took on the narrative again, was to use more euphemisms to mask the physicality of what had happened as much as possible.

The point was, he said, that he hadn't really known how to do it, and so he'd made a botch of it. It had taken longer than it should have, and Azazel had tried to step in  out of mercy or professional outrage at his incompetence or simple blood-lust, Janos was never sure  but Shaw called him back with his name, so Azazel ended up only watching impassively.

When it was finally over and done with, Azazel had taken them back to the ship directly  Janos could no longer remember what Shaw had wanted from the man or why he had decided to have Janos kill him  and when they'd gotten there Shaw had slapped Janos on the back cheerfully and said, "Well, son, that couldn't have gone much worse if you'd tried," and Janos had wanted to tear that smarmy and condescending smile from Shaw's face with his bare hands, had wanted to hurt Shaw even more than he'd wanted to no hurt the man he'd killed and in all of the same ways, but instead he had lurched away, running for the ship's railing, and he'd made it there just in time to avoid fouling the deck, and had vomited everything that was inside him into the ocean.

And when that was over with, Janos had left his head hanging over the edge of the railing, his eyes squeezed shut, trying not to feel anything except the sensation of the ocean breeze and the salt spray against his face. Behind him, he heard Shaw say something snide in English  he didn't know what  and he heard Emma laugh, but he didn't react.

A few seconds later Janos felt a hand on his back he he tensed against it,certain that it was Shaw and hating his touch, hating everything about Shaw and about his own life and about himself, and hating his inability to effect anything, to control anything, to make anything stop 

But the hand was making tentative circuits around his shoulder blades, and after a moment Janos recognized the touch as being too heavy and awkward to be Shaw's. From above him, he heard Azazel say to the others, "Janos is very ill. It is because of last night's fish  didn't I say that it smelled bad?"

"Sure," Emma said, but Azazel ignored her.

"Let's get out of the light," Azazel said to Janos gravely. "The sun is very bad when you are sick." Shepherding him carefully by the arm, he lead Azazel down the stairs and below deck. Janos didn't want to go down there  there were nothing but bad memories down there  but he had felt helpless to argue.

It was true that it was cooler down there, and that the dim light made his head hurt less, but all of that was very much beside the point in Janos's view. He didn't want to be made to feel better, and he didn't want  or deserve  pity. He wanted to find some way to hurt Shaw and he wanted to find some way to make up for what he had done, and he wanted  even just for pretend  to be able to believe that there was any possibility of him achieving either of these goals.

But he could communicate none of that to Azazel, so Janos only allowed the other man to lead him to an empty bunk. Janos sat down.

"It wasn't the fish," he told Azazel.

"I know," Azazel said. "But I did not want you to be embarrassed."

"You're a bad liar," Janos said.

Azazel shrugged. "Those two aren't being very good comrades right now. Sometimes, I think they..." He didn't finish the thought, but Janos was watching him closely now, entertaining seriously for the first time ideas that he hadn't even dared to think about before; if Azazel's loyalty to Shaw and his attachment to Emma had been shaken badly enough by all of this, then maybe he could be convinced to leave with Janos. Trying to run on his own would be pure suicide  especially if there was a good chance that Azazel would only fetch him back directly for Shaw. But if Azazel was with him  if he was on Janos's side  then it would be the simplest thing in the world to get away.

And maybe they could do more than run. Maybe Shaw wasn't completely unkillable. If Azazel were to drop him in the middle of the ocean or at the center of the arctic circle, maybe he would drown or freeze or starve to death. If he told Azazel what had happened down here, what Shaw had done to Raul and his mother, would make a difference? Would Azazel believe him and would it be enough to convince him to 

But then Azazel said, "But I don't think it is anything personal against you that Shaw is being so... demanding right now. It is only that his plan is very complex, so it is of the greatest importance that everyone should know how to carry out their roles correctly and without error. So there is a great deal of pressure on him right now to make sure everything goes well. But he likes you very much, Janos, you should know that. Shaw has told me this."

Well, could he really blame Azazel for not getting it? It had taken Janos months to see through Shaw, even with Alicia whispering the truth in his ear, and Azazel had even less to work with than Janos so far as social savvy went.

"The plan," Janos said. "Right." Shaw's bloody stupid plan to start a nuclear war. He'd been talking about it for nearly a year by this point, but  even with everything he had learned about Shaw  Janos hadn't ever really believed that he actually meant to carry it out. But recently Shaw had made a sudden shift from talk to action, and things had begun to shift into position with an ease and speed that left Janos badly worried. He was beginning to suspect that Shaw was actually serious... but the implications of that were almost too frightening to consider.

The hatch opened above them, and Emma came downstairs. Janos sat up quickly.

"Shaw needs to speak with you," she told Azazel.

Azazel nodded and turned to go back above deck, but he paused at the foot of the stairs. "Be nice," he said softly to Emma. Janos supposed that he'd met to whisper that, and that Janos wasn't supposed to have heard it, but Azazel was bad at gauging his own volume.

"I'm always nice," Emma told him, smiling sweetly.

Azazel shook his head dubiously, then headed upstairs.

When he was gone, Emma turned to Janos and said, "You've been down here thinking dangerous thoughts."

"No I haven't," Janos said quickly.

"Oh honey, you can't lie to me  you know that."

She sat down on the edge of the bunk, poised in white silk and fur, diamonds sparkling in her ears and at her throat. Emma had changed since she'd first joined them, Janos realized suddenly. She wasn't a kid anymore, and the brittle edge was gone from her voice. She seemed... more secure. Not surer of herself, because she'd never seemed to have any doubts on that regard, but the wounded outrage with which she had confronted the world only six months previously had become something more like bored cynicism.

"Don't tell Shaw," Janos said, disgusted by the note of pleading in his voice. "I don't really mean it."

"Of course you mean it, but that doesn't really matter, because you lack the aptitude to make any of the things you want happen. Azazel running away with you? Please. He only feels badly for you because it's so obvious that you can't take care of yourself.

"As for Shaw  Janos, do you really think he doesn't know how you feel about him? Honestly, you're laughably transparent. It doesn't really matter, though; no one cares what you think, as long as you keep on doing what you're supposed to do."

She cocked her head at him, listening in on thoughts that he was trying very hard not to think. "You think I'm threatening you, but you couldn't be more wrong. I'm only explaining things so you understand them, so you don't run into any unnecessary trouble. I wouldn't want to see another Mutant get hurt, and I know you know I mean that. After the war is over with "

"We aren't going to live through Shaw's war," he spit out at her. There was no point in keeping that opinion to himself, after all, if she'd just find it herself.

"Don't be more ignorant than you already are," she said, but Janos didn't answer.

Instead, he called up to the forefront of his mind everything he could remember learning about what happened when to the survivors after the Americans dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; the burns and running sores, the lost hair and teeth and vision, the cancers and bleeding disorders, the infertility and the deformed infants.

"Is that what you're worried about?" Emma asked lightly. "We're going to be well clear of the blast sits  Azazel will see to that  so you don't have to worry about getting hurt. As for the rest of it  that stuff doesn't apply to us, Janos. You aren't going to get sick. I've been inside the sub's reactor a dozen times, and Shaw practically lives in there. Do we look sick to you?"

"It doesn't always show," he muttered, stubbornly. His area of proficiency was, after all, the manipulation of the wind, and so he felt that he had a healthy respect for the power of things that couldn't be seen; the idea of radiation poisoning scared him very badly.

She stood up, sighing at him. "You've got a bad attitude, did you know that? That's your entire problem."

And Janos supposed that was true.

Well, things had gone on and time had passed by, and after a while Janos had gotten better at doing what Shaw wanted him to do. It was all entirely unjustifiable  he knew that  but he tried to justify it nonetheless; he told himself that there was very little that he did for Shaw that Shaw couldn't have done himself, or that Emma or Azazel couldn't have handled, and though that wasn't exactly true it helped him sleep at night. The important thing was that he should continue to believe that he didn't really matter, because then nothing that he did could possibly matter, either.

It was not all that difficult to convince himself of his own unimportance, as the fact of this was constantly being reaffirmed for Janos by Shaw and Emma. When the CIA attacked them in Miami, Shaw's damned yacht-with-an-attached-submarine, which he'd gone to ridiculously lengths to have built, actually turned out to be useful... for Shaw and Emma.

Janos, on the other hand, was left behind, forgotten on the tottering deck of the half-yacht while those two made good their escape. It was only because Azazel remembered him that Janos avoided a sniper's bullet or eventual capture.

But that was the way it always was; Azazel was the one who looked out for Janos, who was there when Janos needed help. He was the only one who seemed to notice that Janos even existed, and the only one who seemed to hear him when he spoke, even if Janos never dared to say very much. For the longest time, he was the closest thing to a friend that Janos had.

Emma had some consideration for Janos on principle because he was a Mutant, but he never really doubted that she'd drop him dead with a thought if he somehow managed to threaten Shaw or the plan. To Shaw, who might have reduced his body to ash with a touch, he meant absolutely nothing. So he was trapped, but he should have tried to do something to stop it from happening  should have in the very least refused to take part, even if it did mean his death  but he'd become a coward under Shaw, and that sense of cowardice told him that he could do nothing. There had been a time in his life when he had been intensely egoistical, but he'd never been in possession of enough hubris to believe that he could save the world from someone like Shaw.

"Erik fought, though. Shaw hurt him so bad, but Erik just kept coming until he won. He wasn't afraid to fight back."

Mystique didn't think that was slightly true; Erik had been half-crazed with the terror when he left to go inside the sub. It was just that he hadn't allowed the fear to stop him.

"All of you fought," Janos said, and admiration in his voice was plain.

"I didn't do much," Mystique said, because that was only true. She paused, wondering if it was wise to even ask, but then she said, "Why didn't you switch sides, if you didn't want Shaw to win?"

Janos didn't shrug his shoulders so much as allow them to slump. "Didn't think you guys could win." Mystique laughed. "I'm serious! Shaw had the helmet, so he thought that meant your telepath wouldn't be able to touch him, and he figured the rest of you for scared kids. And for a change it seemed to me that he was right."

"I guess he forgot about Erik."

Janos shook his head. "No, he never did. But he was convinced that Erik was going to come over to his side."

"That's crazy."

"That's what Emma told Shaw. They argued a lot about it, after what happened in Miami. Emma said she'd been inside his mind and knew that Erik only wanted to kill him, but Shaw said she was reading him wrong. He was convinced." He shrugged again. "Sometimes Emma does make mistakes, but she was absolutely right in this case. Shaw was just too stupid to listen to her.

"I think that's why she stayed away, after the CIA caught her. Azazel couldn't find her on his own  he's never been able to sense her, for some reason  but she could have whistled for him, and she could have walked out of that cell any time she wanted to. But I think she was fed up with being ignored.

"But the other thing was..." he hesitated. Mystique urged him on with a gesture of her hand. "The other thing was that you and your friends were all really brave  but you shouldn't have been able to win. Really."

"What do you mean?"

"You saw how Azazel was at the CIA base, right?" She nodded stiffly  it wasn't as though she was likely to ever forget. "You know he could have killed those boys  Hank and Sean and Alex, right?  very easily if he'd been taking it at all seriously. But he left his swords somewhere else very shortly after the fighting started. And he only tried to drop them once, you know?

"Don't misunderstand what I'm saying, please, because I'm not trying to tell you that he wasn't trying to kill them, or that he wouldn't have killed them. But the thing is, he wasn't doing his best. He's normally much more effective than he was in Cuba."

"Why?"

"Your guess is probably better than mine. I don't think he has a concept of fighting fair  anyway, I've never seen him fail to exploit the advantages his ability gives him to the fullest before Cuba  but maybe he decided other Mutants deserved a sporting chance? Maybe he wanted to see what they could do first, or maybe he was just having too good a time to end the fight right away. Maybe he had his own reasons to want to undermine Shaw, and that's why he didn't give it his best."

He spread his hands. "But I don't really know. I never know why he does what he does, and anyway, I didn't see enough of the fight to say. I was sort of busy getting squashed under the wall of a submarine and getting stepped on." Mystique caught herself grinning at that. She covered her mouth with her hand. "It's sort of sad, isn't it?" Janos said, but she was relieved to see a smile playing on the edges of his own lips. "But don't worry  I'm used to stuff like that."

Mystique wanted to ask more questions, but just then one of the doors opened, and Fred poked his head outside. "You guys get lost out here or something?" he demanded. "Where's Todd, anyway?"

She pointed upward, and Fred's eyes followed the trajectory of her finger to find the boy in the branches. "Get down here," Fred told him. "It's time for lunch."

That had the desired effect, as Todd hopped down to the ground directly and darted around Fred's legs, heading fast toward the kitchen.

"Why didn't we think of that?" Janos asked Mystique, as they headed inside after him.


	33. Chapter 33

_How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn't they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a little while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise? - Don DeLillo_

* * *

When the phone on his desk began to ring, Charles didn't need to guess who was on the other end of the line. Only one other person on earth had the number for that particular line, after all.

Or rather two, if Erik had done as Charles asked and given the number to Raven as well. Charles wondered if he actually had.

He sat staring at the phone, mulling over what he had learned earlier that day, during his visit to the hospital in New Orleans. The events of the day before, as seen through the eyes of the prison guard who Raven had attacked, played through his mind once again.

Charles could not recall a time when he had ever before felt so badly frighten for ( _or was it of?_ ) Raven.  

He remembered what it had been like after he'd first found her, back when they were both small children. From the first night, Charles had always been afraid that she might someday run away from him. Raven had been like a lost wild animal, at turns timorous and suspicious in the face of kindness, poised always to bolt.

Charles learned very quickly that she was scared of almost everything and everybody, and that fear could make her mean, especially if she felt backed into a corner. For the longest time, he was the only person in the world for which she made an exception, and even then it took a while for her to come around, to really and truly start to trust that he wouldn't hurt her.

The matter with their  with his  mother and step-father had shaken her badly. Charles knew it had been a wrong thing to do, tricking them into thinking Raven as theirs, but he hadn't been able to come up with any other way to get them to let him keep her.

So he'd introduced them to Raven as their daughter, and had given them a hard _push_ into believing it, and the two of them had acted as though it was always true and they'd always known it.

It had made him feel magnanimous to share his parents with her. Granted that they weren't much by way of parents  Charles had understood that even then  but what he'd done had secured a home for Raven, which she had so obviously needed. Even as guilty as he felt for manipulating his mother and and step-father, Charles felt clever for having pulled it off, proud for have taken care of his new sister properly.

Except that Raven had reacted to his mother's hug with a serge of unthinking terror so intense that it nearly drowned out all thought from Charles's own mind. She was like a bird that, having discovered itself imprisoned, froze in listless horror on the floor of its cage rather than throwing itself against the bars. Raven froze stiffly in his mother's arms, externally quiet and absolutely still, but her mind roared with panic.

When he and Raven had been alone again  something which Charles had contrived to bring about very quickly, because it was obvious that disaster was looming  Raven had broken into indignant tears, and very quickly after that Charles had been crying as well, out of hurt and confusion. He looked through her mind, trying to see where he had gone wrong, what he had done that was so bad so he could fix it, but whatever the thing was in was hidden, obscured somehow by a kind of gray fog  or rather by something that was represented in his own mind's eye as fog.

It wouldn't be until later that he learned to recognize these blurry patches in the minds of some individuals as suppressed memories, but at the time he hadn't understood any of it, and Raven would only say  repeating it again and again  "They're your parents! I don't want them  I never asked you for any more parents!" and he'd been at a complete loss.    

Raven made him promise to stay out of her mind after that, frightened, Charles thought, that he'd push her into believing something the same way he had his mother and Kurt Marko, even though he never would have. But he tried to do what she asked, even if it was hard sometimes to keep that type of promise, and that was part of the reason why it took him so long to understand exactly what it was that had upset her that badly.

It was through the dreams  or rather, the nightmares  that Charles came to understand how it was that Raven had ended up in his house, in the middle of the night and all alone.

Charles's mother and step-father were away more often than not, but between his au pair and the other servants Charles and Raven were, of course, never left alone at home. It took Raven a long time to feel safe in that big old house with so many other people  that was what she told him  so most nights she would sneak into his room and into his bed to sleep beside him.

And most nights she would dream about what her parents had tried to do to her. Charles really did try to keep out of her head  and not only because he wanted to keep his promise  but when they were both asleep her nightmares had a way of leaking out of her mind and working their way into Charles's, infecting his own dreams.

So Charles would dream of water running in a bathtub. Of a rough hand on the back of his neck, pushing him under, while another pair of hands twisted his arms behind his back. He'd dream of being drowned, and of breaking away, of blood on white tile.

And he'd wake shaking and sobbing from these second-hand nightmares, and Raven would be there, doing the best she could to fix whatever it was that was wrong with him. She'd get him to tell her stories or to read to her, anything to take his mind off the badness, and she'd sit up awake with him for as long as he needed her to. But she didn't understand where the dreams were coming from.

When Charles asked, Raven always said that she never remembered her dreams, and thought sometimes he had trouble telling if someone was lying without peeking into his or her mind, Charles was absolutely certain that Raven was telling him the truth as she understood it.

On the other hand, when it came to questions about her life before he'd found her, Raven was universally evasive. It seemed to him that she was doing her best to forget whatever had happened, and that seemed like the best thing to do, so he never told her that her own nightmares were the source of his own. He was a little afraid that she might get angry with him for being inside her head after he'd said that he wouldn't.

And he was her brother now, and big brothers were supposed to protect their little sisters.

Something had gone terribly wrong on that count, between the two of them. But even with all the time that he's had to think about these things since Cuba, Charles still couldn't say exactly what.

Raven was not forthcoming. They'd spoken over the phone a few times  always, he knew, with Erik listening in the background  during the last two weeks, but she almost never said anything personal, anything that would shed light on what was happening in her life now. She allowed Charles to dominate each conversation, and when she did speak her words were noncommittal, a cover for whatever she was really thinking. She was keeping almost everything from him, and Charles was not certain as to why.

He'd been locked out of aspects of Raven's life before, but not like this  not so completely or inexplicably. And now that they were talking again, the distance only seemed to continue to grow in a manner that was beginning to feel alarmingly irrevocable.

Charles did not understand why things should be developing in this way, or who  if anyone  was to blame for it.

But he'd had his suspicions. And what had happened in New Orleans served only as confirmation.

When Charles had gone to the hospital, he'd found that man that Raven had attacked awake in his bed, and  as one of the nurses had remarked  "cross as a wet hen." The man, who Charles would learn was named Earl Parks, had his arm in a sling. Charles understood from thoughts gleaned from the nurses minds and a quick glance at the man's medical charts (Charles had gotten quite good at reading these as of late, having had so much practice studying his own) that bones had been broken and tendons torn, and that the recovery would be lengthy and imperfect. He made a mental note to see to the associated medical bills.

Earl had looked Charles up and down from his bed, redden eyes lingering over the chair, and he said, "Aw hell, and here I'd thought I was bad off," and Charles smiled wanly, not yet accustomed to the reaction he  it, the chair  provoked now but beginning to see that he would need to be resigned to it, and introduced himself with a false name that the man wouldn't be able to recall later in any case. Behind Charles, Sean had closed the door, and Charles sent Earl's roommate off on a nape and went after the memory that he had come here to collect.

There wasn't often reason to go as deeply into another person's mind as Charles did then, and it was surreal, seeing his sister through the eyes of this man. The angle was different, everything viewed from a great height than Charles was accustomed to, especially as of late. Earl needed glasses, and in Charles's mind's eye the picture was unfocused.

But the people, too, were skewed. In Earl's memory  which was not, of course, a perfect reconstruction of the events, but simply his most recently amended recollection, colored by pain and a shocking quantity of hate  so many things were perceived differently from how Charles believed them to be.

It was true, for example, that the teleporter was not a handsome man, and yet Charles knew very well that he did not have the pointy ears or gnarled and claw-tipped fingers with which he appeared in the memory. His sister had never been as dark-skinned as she was here, nor her scales so sharp and angular.

It was impossible from inside the memory to separate empirical fact from the man's flawed perception, but the sublimely vicious way in which she moved toward (Charles) Earl struck him as terribly out of character for Raven and yet somehow entirely too true to life.

She snapped out of it  whatever _it_ was  an instant later, panicking when (Charles) Earl drew his gun and pointed it at her, and that had seemed more like his sister. But then the gun had been wrenched from his hands  Erik's work, that  and Raven had pressed the attack, fumbling with her weapons to bring up the knife as she came on, closing the space between the (two of them) herself and the other man, and 

 And now Charles stopped the borrowed memory there, because he had no desire to feel again the extricating pain of having his arm twisted back in a way that it was never meant to go, blackness cutting off the bite of the blade pressed against (his own) the other man's throat.

Charles could say with no certainty what had happened after that, as Earl had not been conscious to witness it, but obviously Raven had stopped.

Thank God, Raven had stopped what she was doing.

But the question was what had caused her to start in the first place.

The phone was still ringing. With serge of anger that surprised Charles's himself, he lunged forward and grabbed the phone from its cradle and spat into the mouthpiece, "Just what the _fuck_ are you doing to my sister?"

There was a short pause before Erik's voice came back in answer. Charles hoped that he'd taken Erik off-guard  he'd certainly shocked himself  but when Erik did speak his voice was detached and matter-of-fact. It was his Magneto Voice, and Charles had already learned to hate it.

"Come now, Charles," he began. "I'm not 'doing' anything to her. All else aside, surely you know your own sister better than that. Raven never follows anyone anywhere she didn't already want to go."

Erik paused again, then added, "But I suppose that you've seen the papers."

"I've done better than that, actually. I've been down to New Orleans myself."

"Oh good, then we've no cause for argument, because you'll know that everything Raven did was in self-defense. The fool pointed a gun at her."  

"Because she was coming toward him! Erik, it was a _prison break_ , what would you expect a guard to do under those circumstances "

"Actually, I don't think anything Raven herself did was the determinant factor for good ol' Earl," Erik said, his voice taking on a thick southern accent on the last three words. "It might have been protocol to draw his weapon in such a situation, but I don't think that's really why he did it. I think Raven could have been walking down the street, minding no one's business but her own, and good ol' Earl would have still pulled that gun on her and he'd have shot her dead and he wouldn't have given any of it a second thought.

"But you're the one that's been inside his head personally. I only know what Emma's told me  she claims the man's mind is a cesspit  and what I saw with my own eyes. So please do tell me if I'm wrong."

And Charles wanted to tell him just that very badly... but he couldn't. In Earl's mind, Charles had seen everything that had ever caused him to fear for Raven's safety. The man had wanted to destroy his sister completely, to blot out from the world the _wrongness_ that was in her eyes and the color and texture of her skin, and if Raven had had the same intentions toward him there was no causality between that and his initial reaction to her.

 _Only because she was blue,_ he wanted to say. _Everything would be okay if she was only careful to look normal._ But he knew very well that that wouldn't go over well with Erik.

So instead he said, "There was no valid reason for Raven to have went with you to that jail in the first place, Erik. You and the teleporter ought to have gone alone. _You_ created a dangerous situation, when you're met to be keeping her safe."

It was Erik's rage now, rather than his own, that took Charles by surprise. "And just what the hell do you think I'm trying to do, Charles?"

"What exactly does that mean?" Charles demanded.

"Nothing more or less than just that," Erik said. "The world isn't a safe place, I'll have you know. The humans have already demonstrated that we won't be shown any mercy  you've seen that with your own eyes  so maybe you ought to take note of the fact that we need to "

By now, Charles had enough experience with these types of arguments  of which there had been several since Cuba  to know that once Erik had begun to use the phrase 'the humans' all meaningful discussion was over. "That's all very interesting, Magneto," he cut in. "Thank you very much for sharing your point of view with me. Now may I please speak with Erik?"

And remarkably, on the other of the line, Erik laughed. It was the sort of laugh that made Charles's hands tinge and his heart beat too fast. It was the sort of laugh that he missed hearing, that made him think that all of this wasn't useless, that something might still be patched up and made to work between the two of them.

"You do know how to call me out, don't you?" Erik said.

"What are you keeping from me?" Charles asked, but the force he would have liked to be in his voice was lacking.

"Nothing at all," Erik said, and this was such an obvious lie that Charles didn't even know what to begin to say to it. "I just haven't gotten to that part yet  give me a minute, I want to ask you a question first.

"How did you manage to make it down to New Orleans and back home that quickly? Have you found yourself a teleporter?"

"Hank's built us a new jet, actually." Hank had christened it the 'Blackbird,' a fact that made Charles's wonder if he wasn't the only one who had Raven on his mind a lot these days.

"Very groovy," Erik said seriously, and despite his better judgment Charles snorted and then laughed outright. Erik was almost as good at copying accents as Raven.

"There was one more Mutant than we expected at the circus," Erik went on. "A small boy. Todd, his name is, or Toad. I know this wasn't part of our agreement, but I want to keep him here with us for the time being."

"It would be better for the children to be at the school, rather than..." Charles started, but didn't finish because all he could have said was 'wherever you are.' Erik had kept the location of the headquarters for the Brotherhood of Mutants to himself; it had to do with security, he said. Charles suspected that they were in Detroit  the auto plants would have been a major draw for a man with an ability like Erik's  but that was only a guess.

"I know, I know," Erik said. "But the situation is that Fred  that's the large man that you saw on Cerebro  feels himself to be something of an older brother toward the boy. I don't know how he'd take to the idea of being separated."

Part of the deal that they had made when Charles had agreed to allow Erik help him find Mutants in need of aid was that the youngsters would if at all possible be enrolled in his new academy, but Erik's concerns did not seem unreasonable. "Well, why don't you have the two of them come up to the school and look things over? Have Azazel bring you lot here."

Charles wanted an opportunity to take a good look at the teleporter's mind, anyway. He hadn't had a chance to do so during the fight in Cuba  too much else had been going on. Later, after Erik and Raven and the others had gone, Azazel had come back, had gotten Charles and the rest safely off the beach, but at the time Charles had been very close to going into shock, and much of this was only a blur to him now.

He could remember a brief argument between Hank and Azazel, once it had been established that he had not returned to finish them off, over which hospital Charles should be taken. The Russian had insisted that Havana General was both the best and closest, but Hank had convinced him to transport them to John Hopkins. A good thing, that, because between the strain of his injury and the effects of his medications, it had been quite some time before Charles had been up to using his ability effectively. It was difficult enough to convince the doctors and nurses at the American hospital to overlook his sudden arrival in the E.R., and it would have been a much more strenuous task to convince the Cuban authorities that there was nothing dodgy going on when a British national happened to show up from nowhere with a bullet wound.

Charles could also remember seeing Azazel looking down at him from what had seemed like a great height. It was horribly embarrassing to think back on it now, but he could also remember telling the other man  perhaps more than once  that he could not feel his legs, as it had seemed very important at the time that everyone should understand this. The teleporter had frown at this, and then he'd shrugged  not indifferently, but as though at something that was beyond anyone's control to alter and therefore pointless to offer comment on, which as it turned out was true enough  and had gone off  to find a stretcher.

Charles had tried, during all of this, to read Azazel's mind, but he had an idea that even at the best of times he would have found the other man's mind confusing. It was a maze of non sequiturs and strange associations, but he had glimpsed his sister there, accompanied by a thousand question marks.

The fact that Raven was presumably now sleeping in the same building as Azazel still made Charles extremely nervous. The teleporter had come back for them, yes, but that did not mitigate the fact that he was capable of horrific acts of violence.

But now Erik was talking. "That should be easy to arrange," he said.

"Good," Charles said. Then he added, "Bring Raven along as well, won't you?" and was pleased by how casual his voice sounded in his own ears. He'd been badly worried that it might come out as a plea.

Erik was silent for what seemed like a long time  long enough to make Charles worry if he'd overplayed his hand. Then he said, "I'll see what I can do."


	34. Chapter 34

_I am learning to see. I don't know why it is, but everything enters me more deeply and doesn't stop where it once used to. I have an interior that I never knew of… What's the use of telling someone that I am changing? If I'm changing, I am no longer who I was; and if I am something else, it's obvious that I have no acquaintances. - Rainer Maria Rilke_

* * *

Janos had talked to Mystique for a long time, but even with as much as he had told her, she understood that he'd never managed to work up the nerve to say exactly what he'd set out to say to her about Erik.

But it wasn't that hard to read between the lines.

He'd said – more or less – _Erik frightens me_ , but he hadn't quite managed to go so far as to say outright, _Erik frightens me because I'm afraid that I'm being lied to again, because I'm scared that he might turn out to be just another Shaw_.

And once Mystique made that connection, Janos's reasons for telling her the story about the first man he'd killed under Shaw's orders became entirely obvious.

So toward evening of the day following the raid on the New Orleans prison, Mystique knocked on Erik's door. She waited to hear the deadlock turn itself – or rather, for it to turn under the influence of Erik's ability – and pushed the door open.

Erik stood up from behind his desk when she came in. "Raven – good," he said, as she looked around. The room wasn't much changed from the last time she'd been in here, about three months earlier, the night before they'd "rescued" Emma from the CIA base.

The books had multiplied, lining new shelves along the walls. Many of the titles were in languages that she couldn't read – French and German, mostly, as well as a few in Russian. She could sound out the Cyrillic letters on those by now, though she didn't know the meaning of most of the words.

She noted a thin book with an English title laying open and spine-up on the top of Erik's desk –

A Study of the Paraplegic Patient. Mystique noticed Erik noticing her looking at it, and she shifted her eyes sideways as he slid the book deftly under a stack of papers.

 _That's something we should be talking about_ , Mystique thought, but she didn't even know how to begin.

"I'm glad you're here – there's something I wanted to show you," Erik said, moving to another pile of documents and drawing out a folder. "That I wanted to ask you about, is what I mean," he corrected.

He was nervous, she realized, and it didn't have much of anything to do with that little book on Charles's condition. Well, Mystique had worked out a thing or two, so maybe he had good reason to be.

Erik handed Mystique a sheet of yellowed paper, long fingers handling the brittle paper gingerly. There was a stretch on the paper – a man's face in profile, shoulder-length hair drawn back primly in a taunt pony-tail. Mystique stared down at it, frowning.

"It's Shaw, isn't it?" Erik prompted.

"It's so _old_ , Erik."

"I know. But it is him?"

"Yeah." She'd been sure of that the first second she saw the picture.

"I thought that you might be able to tell me for certain, given your ability. I don't suppose you ever mistake a face, do you?" He took the paper back. "That first drawing was made around 1690. He was living under the name Hiram Shaw at the time, in Salem, Massachusetts. The name 'Shaw' is normally English or Scottish, but it's also possibly an Americanization of certain German sire names. All of this is only relevant if we assume that he was at some point born a Shaw, and didn't simply adopt the name.

"This is as far back as I've been able to trace him, but I'm not at all certain that he was born in Salem, or if Hiram was his first given name. A godly man, by all accounts, Reverend Hiram Shaw, and much in favor of the burning of witches and other undesirables. He supposedly became lost in the woods during an especially nasty winter storm, and was presumed to have frozen to death. The body was never recovered, of course."

Erik handed her Polaroid – a picture of a picture this time, a blurry sepia color of a band of Confederate solders. It took Mystique a moment to pick out Shaw, standing off to the side and wearing an officer's uniform. "Cornelius Shaw – not the last Cornelius in the family tree – who was believed to be killed in an explosion at an arms depot." The quirk of Erik's eyebrow said that they both knew better than that. "Again, the body was never recovered. You'll find that there's a notable lack of bones in the Shaw family cemetery."

"His 'son,' who was living out west at the time, inherited everything Cornelius had, which by then was not a small amount, as the family had been doing very well for itself over the many decades. He parried the funds into land speculation, which marked the start of the family fortune."

The next picture was of a man in a suit and top hat, leaning casually on a stylish cane. It was without a doubt Sebastian Shaw.

The edge of Erik's lips twitched. "Until recently, Cornelius was the last member of the family to die a violent death. He seems to have realized that there was no need to be as creative as he had been in the past. Starting in the late 1870s, he started playing a new game.

"Every twenty years or so, the contemporary Shaw would leave his growing business empire in capable hands, and set out to live abroad. Ten to thirty odd years later, he'd return, posing as his own son, and take up the family business again."

"Rinse and repeat," Mystique said.

Erik nodded. "Right. But what's really interesting is the things he'd get into while on these little holidays. He'd take a new name wherever he happened to land. Klaus Schmidt came into existence, as near as I've been able to discover, around 1931 and disappeared off the face of the earth in early 1945 – didn't want to hang around for the end game, I suppose.

"Prior to that, we see him in the Ukraine between 1917 and and mid '22, with the White Army. He was calling himself Stepen Sokolov at the time. I don't have a picture from this period, but I'm fairly certain it was him – I recognize the tactics, you see.

"It's a recurring pattern. He'd show up somewhere where there was civil unrest, economic crisis, sectarian violence – or ideally, all out war – and place himself in the center of it. If the conditions on the ground weren't adequate, he'd attempt to manipulate the major players into an escalation. I have it from Angel and Janos both that Shaw was extremely good at this, so far as getting what he wanted from the important Soviet and American players went. All of this to his own ends."

"So he could become more powerful."

"Right. To create conditions under which he could absorb more energy." He smiled at her then, sardonic but nonetheless clearly pleased that she'd worked things out for herself, and Mystique almost reconsidered what she was about to do.

But no. She didn't share any of Janos's suspicions or fears about Erik's intentions, but in some things it was past time that she asserted herself.

Erik continued on. "Shaw was in Argentina eight or nine years ago. Janos filled me in on some of this, though he only became involved toward the end and in any case didn't seem to have really understood what was going on – then or now. Schmidt – _Shaw_ – was going by a couple of different names at the time, but that's not really important beyond that it seems to indicate that he was playing for more than one side. I also have it from Janos that he had at least a dozen old Nazis working with him, but the important thing is that whatever he was trying to provoke didn't seem to bear much fruit. Perhaps Juan Perón wasn't the man he'd expected."

Erik dropped the folder back onto his desk, and it landed with a heavy thump. Mystique wondered how much time and energy Erik had spend uncovering all of this, tracking down the trail of a man who was already safely dead, when he should have been focusing on the Brother, forging friendships and earning allegiances and charting their future course. Instead, he'd been almost inaccessible since the beginning.

"It's a shame that the humans weren't even properly grateful," he said, almost peevishly, his back to her. "I did them a big favor when I killed Shaw –"

"Erik," she said, and there was something surprising in her voice – some bite of steel – that made him turn slowly to face her.

"I didn't come up here to talk about Shaw," she started slowly.

Erik's left eyebrow went up. "And?"

"And I need for you to understand something. This is where I want to be – here, with you. This is where the fight back is going to come from – from the Brotherhood, not from Charles's group or anywhere else, and that's because we have you. And I know we – Mutants – have to be ready to fight back, because otherwise... otherwise we're dead, and that's why I need to learn how to fight, too. So I understand what you were trying to do, when you said that I needed to be able to kill that man, why you thought I needed to learn that.

"But, Erik, if you ever try to use another page from Shaw's playbook with me, I'm gone. I don't know where I'll go or what I'll do, but I'll go."

She might have slapped him, from the baffled hurt that spread across his face. "I never –" he began, but then he paused, and she could almost see him _decide_ to get outraged instead of wounded. "How dare you compare –"

" _No_ ," she told him, and a distortion came into her voice, as sometimes happened when she was very frightened or incensed, a sort of echoing, a layering of many voices, none of them completely in sync. It would be many years still, she decided – correctly or not – that this voice, which even she found dreadfully alienating, was her true voice.

But at the moment it brought Erik to a halt, and that was the main thing. She didn't stop to worry about anything else. "Don't you even try that," she went on, in her regular voice, which was no different from the voice that Raven had used, during all those years with Charles. "I _never_ compared you to him. I know that they're two completely different things.

"But the idea came from Shaw, didn't it?"

The fact that he didn't argue was as good as an affirmation. She went on.

"It came from him, and that's stupid, because Shaw was stupid and you're not, so you shouldn't have to be drawing on his stupid tricks to try to teach me something. Because I'm not stupid, either, Erik, so please don't treat me like I am.

"And I know that Shaw made Janos do what he made him do because he wanted to break Janos." She might have as easily used Erik's name in place of Janos's – she had little doubt that Shaw would have used the same tricks with Erik as he had with some of the other Mutants under his control – but it seemed better not to draw attention to Erik's own unhealed wounds at the moment. "And I know you did what you did because you don't want to see me get broken – you want to make sure I can take of myself. You worry about me, because I'm not as... dangerous as the rest of you."

He shook his head at that. "There's more to being dangerous than beginning able to spit acid or shut off a person's brain. He paused. "You scare the shit out of Emma, did you know that? She thinks this nice girl stuff is just an act – one you've been putting on so long that you don't even realize it anymore, but still an act. She thinks you're absolutely vicious, really."

She rolled her eyes, hoping that he wouldn't notice how nervous that idea made her, stupid as it was. "The fact that Emma tells lies about people isn't exactly new news, Erik, you know?"

"No," he agreed. He dropped his eyes and said, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have – it was a stupid plan."

"That's okay, I'm new at this crap, too."

He smiled at that, but it was a brief smile, and wane. When he spoke again it was with a strange, stiff formality, "What would you have me do differently?"

"Geez, Erik, just talk stuff out with me, you know? Maybe remember that you're not supposed to be dictator of the Brotherhood."

"Maybe that's what you think. I think you'll find that most of the others have an entirely different set of expectations."

"Janos thinks maybe you're Shaw, and Emma wishes you were," she filled in.

"Yes, and Angel doesn't seem to have any opinion, beyond that both Shaw and I are horribly incompetent, which might be the closest anyone's come to the truth yet.

"And, of course, Azazel still thinks Shaw was a smart guy with a bad plan. He's absolutely convinced that the only issue the two of us had was over that small matter of thermonuclear war, you know." Mystique tried to say something, but Erik waved her off. "I'm content enough to leave things that way, at least for the time being. I find my business has been spread around here quite enough already.

"I know that wasn't you, my dear. It's just Emma. It always is."

 _He doesn't want to be pitied, and he doesn't want to look weak – to look like a victim_ , Mystique thought. She thought she understood that – as much as it was possible for her to understand it, Mystique thought she did – but she also thought he was wrong. But before she could work out how to say any part of that, Erik went on.

"You're going to be really angry with me, I'm afraid," he said. "Because I'm going to ask you to do something else you don't want to do."

"What?"

"Go visit Charles."

"No," she said, without hesitation.

"Why not?"

"I can't," she said, with a growing sense of desperation. "I can't do all of this – everything we're doing here – and be with Charles, too. I can't be both people."

"You're perfectly capable of being a thousand different people," Erik said, and she supposed that was meant to be funny, but she didn't feel the least bit like laughing.

"I don't want him to see what's in my head, Erik. He'll..." but then she stopped, because she had been about to say _He'll hate me_ , but of course that wasn't even close to true. That was half the problem, really, that he _wouldn't_ hate her. "No, Erik. No."

"He needs you, Raven," Erik said. "Please."

"I know," she said. "I know that. I just – I need more time."

"Christmas?" he suggested.

"Yes," she said, latching hold of the idea. Christmas was almost three months away – at least she had time. "Okay. I'll visit for Christmas."


	35. Chapter 35

 

_"Bringing a child into the world is, after all, a visceral statement of hope if ever there was one; an insistence that the world does not have to be taken as one finds it; a kind of promissory note to the future; a demand that we can and must carry on." – Tim Wise_

* * *

**  
**

Mystique winced and lifted Azazel hand from her breast, sliding it down onto her belly. His palm rested there, above her navel, fingers curled in the air uncertainly. "I'm tender there," she said, in explanation.

"Tender?" he repeated, without comprehension.

She supposed it wasn't surprising, that he would have had no opportunity before now to learn a word like _tender_. When in his life would have have had cause to use it? "Sore," Mystique clarified. "Achy. My breasts hurt a little bit, that's all."

"Ah," he said, but she could hear the worry in his voice. They'd been having sex for well over two months by now, but Azazel could still be fretful about the possibility of hurting her. There were not, as she understood it, many physical interactions in his past that did not involve doing violence, and he did not seem to trust himself completely to know how to do otherwise. His perception of himself was that of a soldier and a fighter, and he came to her with a sort of awe and confusion, desperate to be gentle but not always entirely certain of how to do so.

 _Tender_ , she thought again, and wondered if she ought to explain the other meaning of the word. Azazel had it in him to be tender.

He requited a great deal of reassurance, but that was alright by Mystique – most of the boys she'd slept with in the past hadn't been half so concerned with her opinion.

After a pause he added, "Why?" and there was a hint of poorly concealed dread and guilt in his voice.

Mystique turned to her side on the bed to face him, and Azazel's hand shifted from her stomach to her hip. His fingers curled lightly around the curve of her leg. "It's nothing you did," she told him, though that wasn't _entirely_ true.

She lifted her hand and ran a finger down the left side of his face, tracing the course of the scar that was there, and he closed his eye briefly as her finger passed over it. "How'd you get that?" she asked him.

"Trench knife," he said, simply. "In the war."

"There's more to the story then that."

Azazel turned onto his back, folding his hands behind his head so his elbows stuck out at sharp angles. He starred up at the ceiling, his whimsical expression as he thought back appealingly discordant with his rough and scarred features. "A comrade bet me that I could not win fight against him without using my ability." He turned his head toward her, grinning. "He won."

"That doesn't sound like much of a comrade," Mystique commented.

"Ah well, but he was sorry afterward. He was very certain that I would teleport away after all, and that was why he really tried to cut me."

"You should have _moved_ ," she told him.

He shrugged. "The comrade told me the same thing." Azazel turned to look at her again. "But I had said that I would not.

"Aside from your Beast, that comrade was the only man to ever make me bleed. No one can so much as touch me, unless I choose to give them a handy-clap."

"A handicap," Mystique corrected. That ego of his made her nervous – Azazel was so convinced that he was indestructible, and that made him reckless. She remembered how Azazel had sliced his own arm open during the fight with Shaw's old Nazis, though she still could not visualize how he'd actually managed to do that. The cut had since healed, but it left its mark, one wicked scar among a dozen.

Mystique propped herself up on an elbow so she could look down on his face. "How did you get this one, then," she asked him, trailing her finger over his scarred lips, "if no one gave it to you?"

"I broke my sword," he explained, "and part of it came back and hit me in the face."

She didn't know whether to wince or laugh. "Oops," she said, and grinned up at her. "How about this one?" she asked, tracing the smaller, curled scar on his cheekbone.

"I tripped over my own tail and landed on a glass coffee table."

"Why didn't you just teleport away?" Mystique asked.

"I was rather drunk at the time," he explained, without the slightest hint of shame.

Her hand moved on, downward, and when her fingertips danced over his Adam's apple and brushed along his collarbone he shivered.

She stopped at the junction of his shoulder and chest. There was a tangle of scar tissue there the side of her palm, the misshapen flesh hairless and more pink than red. Mystique had been trying to ignore that scar – it made her nervous for reasons that she could not have articulated – but now she touched it, tentatively and very lightly.

Azazel squirmed unhappily at the touch, and she lifted her hand quickly. "I'm sorry," she said. "Does it hurt?"

"No," he said. "It is not tender. But it feels... strange. I can't explain it." Mystique took that to mean that there was nerve damage, that sensation on this burned portion of his skin was limited and disconcerting, but that he lacked the vocabulary to explain it.

"How did it happen?" she asked him.

For the first time since they had begun this discussion of his scars, Azazel looked uneasy. Azazel did not seem to have many bad memories – he took things as they were, without worrying overly much – but Mystique thought now that she had found one.

"We used a great deal of dynamite in the war," he began. "I could get anywhere without difficulty, of course, so I set a number of bombs. To cut off the fascists' supply lines we would destroy railroad tracks and bridges. Sometimes also we would bomb barracks and supply depots and so on and so on. Do you see?"

She nodded.

"Well, dynamite is not dependable thing. Sometimes it explodes when it isn't supposed to. And fire's very bad. It clings to you, even if you teleport away."

Mystique could see him, sixteen and all a soldier, beating at flames as they ate through a partisan's mismatched uniform and charred his flesh.

Azazel lifted one of his hands from behind his head to stroke the underside of her forearm, where Mystique's skin was soft and smooth, unscaled. She thought he must take some comfort from doing that.

For a time she watched his hand, the graceful movements of his thin, spider-like fingers, the enamel sheen of his nails under the light of the desk lamp, but then her gaze began to travel up his arm.

"But what about those?" she asked, nodding toward his forearm. There were scratches there, lines of them, all fresh.

Azazel looked at her strangely then, as though he were trying to figure something out. He drew his hand away, tucking it behind his head again and hiding the scratches. "What do you dream about?"

"Dream?" Mystique repeated, confused by the randomness of the question. "I don't dream at all," she said, and when Azazel didn't answer, but only continued to stare at her, Mystique became suddenly uneasy. "Charles used to ask me that question," she went on quickly, her voice nervous and unsteady even to her own ear. "Charles used to – he'd have horrible nightmares, so bad that he'd wake up shaking and crying. But I've never dreamed."

"But you do," Azazel said.

" _No_ ," she said. "I don't," and there was a warning in her voice, as well as panic, but Azazel heeded neither.

"You do," he insisted. "You moan and growl and cry out, and you kick off the sheets and toss and turn. And if I touch you, you lash out as though you expected to be killed." He held out his scratched arm as evidence. She could see now that there were bruises as well, vague purple splotches barely discernible against the red of his skin.

When she didn't answer Azazel went on, speaking with all the infuriating confidence of a man who'd only rarely in his life known fear or helplessness, and even then only by second-hand. "We're very strong here," he told her reasonably. "No enemies – men or Mutants – will get near this building without Emma knowing of it, and if they come she will stop them. And if by some bad luck she does not, Erik will take their weapons away from them and kill them with their own guns. And if this doesn't happen – if Fred does not crush them between his hands and Remy does not blow them to pieces, if Janos does not break them against the walls and Angel fails to melt their faces away– then I will take you and the boy somewhere safe, and come back to drop all of them on their heads."

Her thoughts were turned inward, and it took Mystique a moment to work out that by 'the boy' he meant Todd. Her hand went to her belly, quite unconsciously.

"And so," he continued, "whatever it is giving you nightmares, there's no reason for you to fear it."

That was his simplicity and his blind spot, she would think later, when the source of the nightmares was revealed to her. Azazel could conceived of no enemy except as an outside force. For him the threat was always real but never so close as to be within their own ranks, let alone within one's self.

"But I haven't been having nightmares," she still insisted, though she knew he was telling her the truth. "I haven't – I don't remember having – and... and Charles would have told me if I was." As soon as the idea came to her, she clung to it. "Charles would have known and he would have told me."

"Would he?" Azazel asked. "It's correct for a brother to protect his sister, _da_?"

She thought about that, wondering if Charles had somehow used his ability to prevent her from recalling her bad dreams. But Emma had told her that Charles hadn't changed anything about her mind, that the blank spaces were memories that Mystique had repressed all on her own.

"I don't want to talk about this anymore," she said.

Azazel shrugged, dropping the topic without further comment.

Mystique debated reaching for the light and going to sleep... but there had been other things that she'd meant to bring up tonight. Only she hadn't wanted to be upset like this when she told Azazel – she'd been holding the news close to her heart for two weeks now, wanting to be sure, waiting for the perfect moment.

But the talk of dreams had left her frighten, and the mention of Charles made her feel lonely and more than a little guilty. So she said, "Azazel... there's something else we need to talk about." But she stopped there, flummoxed, not at all sure how to broach the subject. It was very nearly embarrassing...

Azazel rolled onto his side to face her, his expression quizzically intent.

There seemed no point in beating around the bush. "Azazel... I think I'm pregnant."

He blinked quickly but said nothing, and in the silence her fears began to grow; he won't want it, or else wouldn't want anything to do with it. He'd be angry with her, he would turn on her, abandon her, abandon the both of them –

And still Azazel didn't say anything, nor did his expression change. She began to wonder if she'd been understood. "Do you know what that word means? 'Pregnant?'"

" _Da_ ," he choked out. Now that the mask had broken she could see setting in. His English, so much better than it had been when they'd first met, seemed now to have deserted him completely.

Mystique reached out for his arm, hoping to steady him, but then he disappeared.

"You're kidding me," she said to the empty room, but Azazel returned about ten seconds later, reappearing at the foot of the bed. He looked remarkably disheveled for a man dressed in nothing but a pair of boxer shorts.

He raised a finger. "I did not mean to do that," he told her.

"It's okay, just come back over here," she told him. "There's stuff we need to talk about."

Azazel crawled back into the bed compliantly, something almost childlike in his movements. He sat cross-legged on the mattress across from her, so Mystique sat up as well, propping herself up against the headboard.

"How did this happen?" he breathed.

Mystique found herself suddenly angry. "I _really_ fucking hope I don't need to explain that to you at this point," she snap.

He snorted, and for a moment she still wanted to be annoyed, but then she was laughing too, giggling like a careless fool.

" _Nyet_ ," Azazel said, when he'd gotten enough of his breath back. "No, no, no," he added with less emphasis. "I don't mean – I understand _that much_ , at least. But I never thought... I did not think that this would ever happen for me." He spread his hands, conceding the battle to find the words he wanted.

"I can touch?" he asked, tentatively, the awkward shyness of their first time returned.

"Yeah," Mystique said, leaning back on the sides of her hands, the pillow cushioning the small of her back. "Sure, of course. But I'm afraid that there isn't really anything to feel yet... it's only been less than three months. And I could be wrong," she added, though she didn't think that she was.

Nonetheless, when Azazel spread his palm across her belly, his entire face lit up with wonder.


	36. Chapter 36

_"Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all the dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language... In a like manner, the beginner who has learned a new language always translates it back into his mother tongue, but he assimilates the spirit of the new language and expresses himself freely in it only when he moves in it without recalling the old and when he forgets his native tongue." - Karl Marx_

* * *

She and Azazel stayed up most of the night, just talking. There were a thousand good things, after all, to talk about, and all of them related to the baby.

But for all their talking, they did not discuss the difficulties and dangers that were sure to come. There were a thousand of these threats, too, more than any human parents had ever faced, but Mystique put those fears away in a dark corner of her mind, refusing with almost superstitious dread to grant them any credence.

If it occurred to Azazel to worry about anything he didn't show it; he was all excitement and easy-going male conceit, endlessly pleased with himself and with her and with the idea of the child.

They talked about bright potentialities, about tails and scales and coloration, and they wondered together if their abilities might be hereditary or if the baby would have an entirely unique gift. The child in Mystique's belly was in all likelihood an unprecedented phenomenon, quite possibly the first offspring of two Mutants to ever come into existence, and he or she could be absolutely anything.

She tried not to worry about practical concerns, about who would deliver the baby or treat it if it was ill, or what they would do if it had a mutation that made it a danger to itself or to other, nor did she dwell on all of the things that a child with a visible mutation would be forced to miss out on growing up. The entire world would be aligned against her family, she knew, but for the moment she had no desire to think about the rest of the world.

At the moment, Mystique only wanted to be happy. And she was, propped up in the bed with Azazel, the back of her head resting against his shoulder, his arms curled around her waist.

There was only one thing, really, one nagging though that continued to intrude upon her mind even after she'd put all the other fears aside for the night. It would not leave her alone, that thought, but it was only toward dawn that she found the courage to speak the fear out-loud.

Azazel's hands were still folded over her belly, two parts protective and one part possessive, and Mystique placed her own hand over his, fingers splayed. She was afraid, she supposed, that he might take his hands away after he'd heard her question.

"Azazel..." she began, and though she didn't look up at him Mystique could tell from the way his body tensed beneath her that he had heard the worry in her voice, and that he was listening. "What if the baby isn't a Mutant?"

She could feel the rumble from his chest against her spine when he tried to laugh that off, but when he spoke she could tell that the question had troubled him. "How could baby not be a Mutant?" he said. "It is ours."

"But what if it isn't?"

He was silent for a long moment. Mystique felt rather than saw his shrug. "Still it is ours," he said.

"Still ours," she repeated, and not long after that she drifted off into sleep.

When Mystique woke they were still in the same position, and light was leaking into the room from between the blinds. She was glad that there seemed to have been none of the violent dreams that Azazel had spoken of during the night... She had been so confused and frightened by what Azazel was telling her during last night's conversation that the fact that she had hurt him physically had not really penetrated her mind, but now when she looked down at the scratches on his arm her stomach constricted with shame.

She untangled herself from Azazel's arms and went over to the window, putting a human coloration to her eyes and to her skin before she peered out between the blades of the blinds. The city below was awake and active.

Mystique shook Azazel awake and sat on the edge of the bed, watching him while he dressed. He did not wear the same thing every day – there were variations to Azazel's collection of suits – but for him it was always black with slashes of red, always formal and fastidiously neat.

She was not sure what they looked like to the rest of the Brotherhood, or what the others would think about the baby – what Charles, for that matter, would think about any of it. But watching Azazel now, Mystique was pretty sure that she'd made the right choices.

The dinning room was empty when Azazel and Mystique went downstairs, so they put together a quick breakfast and sat down to Mystique's Russian lessons.

She could remember the first time that they had sat across from one another at this table, alone. That had been the night that Erik released Azazel to put down Shaw's remaining Nazi allies. At the time, the matter had disturbed her, not because she cared anything about the fate of the those Nazis, but because it seemed so far outside of the realm of legality to simply take it upon themselves to kill those men – it was not _the done thing_ , Charles's mother might have said, and Mystique had not yet truly understood how completely cut off from the norms and values of the rest of society the Brotherhood would be.

Now, she comprehended more clearly that they were making their own rules here, that human laws and standards didn't apply because they would never protect Mutants. The point was looking out for other Mutants, and that had meant – quite apart from their crimes against humanity – that Shaw's Nazi friends needed to die, because they'd known to much about the old Hellfire Club to be safely left to their own devises.

Mystique thought now if Erik had set her against one of those Nazis instead of some feckless New Orleans prison guard, she might not have had any of the difficulties that she'd had a few days previously. But she remembered now how uneasy it had made her at the time, to find herself trading small talk with someone who had been engaged in the business of killing only a few minutes earlier, and who would be busy with killing again before very long. The very normality of that short exchanged, a moment of calm in the eye of the storm of terror that Azazel would unleash elsewhere, had been part of what made the entire thing seem so surreal.

Those moments came less frequently now, the moments when she would look at Azazel – or at Janos or Emma or Erik – and find herself struck by the fact that she was looking at a killer. Most of the time, Mystique felt as though she had reconciled herself to what the others were capable of and who they were. In point of fact it had been a surprisingly easy thing to get used to.

They'd been at work for almost an hour when Erik interrupted them. Azazel had created nothing as formal as a lesson plan for Mystique's studies. She followed along as he read children's stories out loud – Mystique had never realized that such a profusion of wonderful children's books existed in the USSR – and she copied down letters and words in Cyrillic, and they had conversations, her ability to hold her own in which had improved almost every day. Today the conversation had turned quickly to babies and to the words for baby things – bottle, nappy, crib – and this was the topic that was on Mystique's when Erik stepped into the room from behind her.

"You two look positively conspiratorial," Erik observed, and Mystique wondered how long he'd been listening. She had told Azazel the night before that she wanted to wait a little while before they told the others the news – she wanted to keep the secret between the to of them for the time being – but now she wondered if she'd managed to let the cat out of the bag herself. "What are you up to?" he asked.

"Just studying," Mystique, and hoped that she sounded innocent.

"I noticed," Erik said. "You're making a lot of progress – sounds like you're going to have better Russian than I do before long. My Russian is shit, of course, but you're making progress _very_ quickly, Raven."

" _Nyet_ , Erik," Azazel said from his side of the table. "Your Russian is very good. _Ist sehr gut_."

"It's not as bad as your German, in any case," Erik allowed, and Azazel barked laughter at that.

"It's not as hard as I thought it would be," Mystique allowed. The Russia was actually coming to her at a startling pace, and she supposed that had quite a lot to do with her ability – it was as easy for her to pronounce news sounds and words as it was for her to copy someone else's voice, and once she'd heard them she never forgot. Syntax was coming to her easily as well, though she was having difficulty making generalizations about grammar.

Mystique thought now about how she had spent her childhood thinking she was stupid because she had never done well in her classes, and how that had weighed on her, limited her concept of herself and what she believed she was capable of. All those years when she had been so terrified of discovery that she hadn't even wanted to go to school, all her energy focused on keeping hidden. She felt cheated – not just of the time wasted in classrooms where she couldn't learn, but cheated out of years of her life which she wasted thinking so little of who she was.

" _Kak prohodyat tvoi uletniye zanyatiya s Emmoy?_ " Erik asked, breaking her train of thought. Mystique frowned, trying to work out the question.

 _My lessons with Emma in what?_ she wondered.

Azazel was shaking his head, a crooked half-smile on his lips. " _Letniye._.." he corrected.

" _'Uletniye'_ is 'pilot?'" Erik said.

" _Nyet_ ," Azazel said, and repeated again, " _Letniye. Uletniye_ is something else." He paused, clearly thinking hard, and Mystique had the sense that he was having difficulty finding a literal translation for the word. " _Uletniye_ is meaning like... is like 'groovy.'"

 _Where does he even_ learn _words like 'groovy'?_ Mystique wondered, but then she supposed that she was probably the one responsible for that. She had a tendency to pick up and repeat turns of phrase, and Charles's little verbal oddities had always been especially contagious.

But Erik's question made sense to her now: he wanted to know how the pilot lessons with Emma were going. Which was an akward question, because actually they hadn't been going at all.

" _My eshe ne bily v aeroportu..._ " she began, nervously, the English running beside the Russian in her mind's eye as she worked her way through the sentence. _We haven't actually gone to the airport yet..._ " _Emma vechno otkadyvaet, potomu chto u neyo... umm..._ " she continued, but stopped there, stymied. _Emma keeps canceling our lessons because she has..._ she had begun to say, but she did not know the correct Russian word to finish the sentence. "... migraines," she said in English, giving up her hunt. "Emma says she's been getting migraines."

"She's skiving off work," Erik said. He looked angry – angrier, Mystique thought, than was warranted by the situation. "I'll take care of it."

"I don't think that's the problem," she began. "Charles used to get headaches, too. I think it might be related to the ability, you know? But I –"

But she didn't get a chance to finish, because at that moment the sounds of people shouting began to come from the hall, followed by something that sounded suspiciously like an explosion.

Azazel and Mystique stood quickly, and they hurried with Erik out into the hallway.

 **Author's Note:** mefisto-vi from Deviant Art provided the Russian translations and transliterations for this chapter, and I want to thank this person for the help.


	37. Chapter 37

 

_"Remember back when you were a kid, and you thought there were actually people that knew what this thing we call "life" was really all about? Remember when you thought there really were "grown ups?" Then, all of a sudden one day you become a "grown up" yourself and the terrifying revelation occurs to you that there really are no "grown ups," just kids that got old and had kids of their own, and no one really knows what the fuck is going on." - Joe Rogan_

* * *

**  
**

Azazel and Erik hurried in the direction from which the explosion had come, Mystique following a step behind. The two men stopped in the wide doorway to the common room, and Mystique slipped between them, squinting against the smoke that was billowing from the room.

She saw Janos and Remy there, standing across from each other. Janos's back was to her, but Remy was facing her direction, and she could tell from a glance that someone – and it wasn't hard to guess who – had struck him in the face. His right eye was red and already beginning to swell, and Mystique thought that it was going to make for one hell of a shiner. Remy was holding a playing card – the king of hearts, she noted – out in front of him like a weapon.

Angel was standing further back in the room, a type of bored distaste on her face as she eyed the two men. As Mystique watched her, Angel dropped down onto the couch with a thump and blew the hair out of her eyes. She crossed her legs and then her arms and sat back, supremely unimpressed with the proceedings.

To Janos's back, what had been a bookcase laid on the ground. It had been blown into a hundred pieces, the books torn apart and scattered, many of them on fire.

"What in the bloody hell is going on here?" Mystique heard Erik demand, as she turned and ran back toward the kitchen to fill a cooking pot full of water.

As she was busy doing so she heard the sound of Azazel teleporting away and then returning a few seconds later. By the time she'd gotten back to the common room with the water, he was already busy spraying the chucks of burning paper and wood down with a fire extinguisher. Mystique sat the pot of water off to the side and forgot about it.

Mystique didn't think that anyone had answered Erik's question while she was gone, and by then a crowd had begun to gather. Emma had come up behind Mystique, and stood taking in the scene with a thin frown drawn across her lips. From the other doorway, Matthew and Luke stared, speaking quietly to one another in worried tones, while Fred loomed above them, his broad face slack with confusion. Todd sat crouched on his shoulder, watching blank and unresponsive, without the slightest sign of surprise at the violence, and Mystique felt her anger flare up against Remy and Janos when she saw that; she had told the boy that they were all friends here, that it was a safe place, and she didn't like to be made into a liar so soon.

"Emma," Erik said, turning to her. "It's possible that one of our neighbors might have taken note of this little disturbance and notified the police. Kindly go outside and wait, so you can inform them that they have the incorrect address, if or when they arrive."

"Right," Emma said lightly, and turned to head for the front door.

"The rest of you may go back to whatever it was you were doing as well," Erik told Fred's group. "Matters are well in hand here, thanks." Matthew and Luke turned their conjoined heads upwards to look questioningly at Fred, so shrugged heavily. He turned to leave and the others followed after him.

And then it was just Remy and the original four members of the Brotherhood.

"Well?" Erik asked Remy and Janos again. His voice was as light as before but Mystique saw that his eyes had gone hard.

By then Remy had put the card away, and Janos and had turned to face Erik. It was clear to Mystique at a glance that Janos was in the grips of something like a panic attack; his eyes were glassy and too large, and his chest was rising and falling too rapidly. His fists were balled at his sides, nails buried in the flesh of his palms, and she could see blood where he'd split the skin of his knuckles against Remy's face.

"It's just guy shit, Erik. It doesn't even matter," Angel said from the couch, when Remy and Janos remained silent, but it wasn't Angel's answer that Erik was waiting for. He ignored her, staring hard at the other two.

Remy broke first. " _Va te faire foutre_ ," he spat at the room at large, and stalked from the common room, going the way that Fred and the others had gone. Erik watched him leave, a tight frown on his face, but did not attempt to stop him.

Erik turned his eyes back to Janos, waiting.

Janos seemed trapped somewhere between rage and panic. The wild, cornered animal look that had made Mystique keep her distance from him for so long was back in his eyes now, and she wanted to tell Erik, _Stop. Just leave him alone. Can't you see how scared he is?_ but she only waited and watched.

Janos took a step toward Erik. He seemed to have to dare himself to do it, propelled by desperate, stubborn pride. He was almost as tall as Erik, and he stood stiff-necked, looking into Erik's eyes, and Mystique could see the tension in the muscles of his neck, how taunt they were. "I hit him," he told Erik simply. And then he added, as though he did not think that he had been understood, "I hit Remy first."

"Yes, I worked that much out for myself," Erik said flatly, apparently not especially impressed by the confession.

And a confession was exactly what it was, Mystique realized suddenly. He expected that someone would be punished – that someone would be made to suffer – for the fight, and he was claiming all of the responsibility and all of the blame for it, but god was he scared.

Erik sounded nearly bored when he asked, "Why?"

Janos opened and closed his mouth, apparently blindsided by the question. "He was trying to steal Angel," he answered finally.

"I wasn't aware that Angel was your property, that she could be _stolen_ ," Erik said.

" _Ha_ ," Angel said, from the couch. "Thank you."

Erik closed the space between himself and Janos, and leaned in very close to him before he said with a soft voice that was dangerously serene. "That's a good impulse, wanting to protect your fellow Mutants. I don't fault you for it. But Janos, if you continue to insist on acting as though they need protected from _me_... then there are going to be some difficulties between us." He straightened, took a step back.

"Clean this mess up," Erik told Janos, and turned to go the way Emma had went.

"That's it?" Janos said to Erik's back. His voice had grown suddenly loud, indignant with disbelief. "I told you that I hit him," he repeated. "You aren't going to _do_ anything?"

Erik stopped in the doorway. He turned back to face Janos. "Do you require chastisement?" he asked speculatively. "Well, I suspect that you will face consequences for this childish nonsense, but that's not my business. I imagine Angel is very capable of handling the matter herself."

"Oh, you bet," Angel said, darkly. It was only now that Remy was gone that Mystique realized how angry she really was with Janos.

Erik nodded at Angel with what looked to Mystique to be suspiciously like approval, and then he continued out of the room and headed down the hall, apparently headed outside to join Emma.

After a moment, Mystique and Azazel turned and went back the way they had come, leaving Janos with the messes he had made.

They returned to the dinning room table and attempted to returned to the Russian lessons, but it was difficult to focus in light of the flurry of angry Spanish that was coming from the other side of the closed door.

"What's she saying?" Mystique asked Azazel. She felt guilty for the question – like a snope – but her curiosity had the better of her.

Azazel grimaced. "That Janos is only ruining things for himself," he translated. "That Angel likes him very much, but that he will only ruin that if he insists on being so suspicious and fearful and jealous, when there is no reason for him to carry on in this way. Also, that she takes all of this as an insult, because he does not behave as though he trusts her to be faithful. But there were more curse words when Angel said these things.

"I don't understand why Janos has gotten this way lately," Azazel went on, speaking for himself rather than repeating Angel now. "He gets so angry so often now, and he says stupid and angry things, and regrets them almost at once, but still keeps doing it. He's always been high-strung, but when Shaw was alive he was much calmer... or more quiet, anyway."

Mystique blinked. _He can't really be that oblivious,_ she thought, at once angry and astonished. "When Shaw was alive he was too fucking scared to have an opinion about anything. Jesus, Azazel, I'd have felt the same way if I was trapped under the thumb of a Nazi –"

"Don't start that nonsense talk again," he said stiffly, and Mystique could see that she'd found one of his buttons, and that he was at least as angry as she was. "It isn't true. Shaw was what he was, but he was no fascist, and you shouldn't repeat things about people who you did not even know."

 _You didn't know him, either,_ Mystique thought. _You might have followed Shaw for years, but you never knew who he was._ That knowledge was what kept her from storming away from the table, and it was what lead her to take a moderate tone when she replied. "I suppose that's true," she allowed. "But I'm going to go on taking Janos's and Erik's words for it."

"What's Erik got to do with Shaw?" Azazel demanded, but now there was confusion in his voice.

Too late she remembered that Erik had told her a few days ago that Azazel was largely ignorant of his history with Shaw – that he believed Erik had killed Shaw only to stop the war – and that Erik had said that he preferred things that way. "Never mind," she said, and changed the subject.


	38. Chapter 38

_"Now, anyone who has ever been compelled to think about it – anyone, for example, who has ever been in love – knows that the one face that one can never see is one's own face. One's lover – or one's brother, or one's enemy – sees the face you wear, and this face can elicit the most extraordinary reactions. We do the things we do and feel what we feel essentially because we must – we are responsible for our actions, but we rarely understand them. It goes without saying, I believe, that if we understood ourselves better, we would damage ourselves less. But the barrier between oneself and one's knowledge of oneself is high indeed. There are so many things one would rather not know! We become social creatures because we cannot live any other way. But in order to become social, there are a great many other things that we must not become, and we are frightened, all of us, of these forces within us that perpetually menace our precarious security. Yet the forces are there: we cannot will them away. All we can do is learn to live with them. And we cannot learn this unless we are willing to tell the truth about ourselves, and the truth about us is always at variance with what we wish to be."- James Baldwin_

_"Fascism is not defined by the number of its victims, but by the way it kills them." - Jean-Paul Sartre_

* * *

Azazel laid on his side in the bed, watching Mystique sleep. She looked peaceful in sleep, and somehow much younger, and more beautiful even than when she was awake. For the last two nights – since the discussion of the child – the nightmares had not come to her, and he had a vague (and ultimately, futile) hope that the matter of the baby had somehow changed things, that now the bad dreams would no longer bother her.

As for himself, Azazel could have counted the number of nightmares he'd had in his life on one hand, but tonight he didn't sleep so easily. There was a deep restlessness in him, a sense of disquiet, and it only grew as he studied Mystique, so vulnerable in sleep. There was a desire to run, to take her and go somewhere very far away – somewhere safe.

But where was safe?

The Savage Land had always been his sanctuary, but it was a wild and cruel place – it suited him well, in large part for those very reasons, but it was by no means _safe_. Azazel would not have dared to leave Mystique there alone for even a minute, even taking into account her astonishing physical strength and growing proficiency with weaponry. There were no answers to his problem there.

Azazel rolled over and climbed out of the bed, dressing silently in the dim light that filtered in through the window blinds. He left through the door, so not to wake Mystique with the sound of his leaving, and walked downstairs.

He could feel most of the other members of the household around him, warmly glowing silhouettes in his mind's eye, only Emma hidden from him by some quirk of his ability. Fred was in the kitchen, Toad curled up inside a cabinet in the laundry room, and Angel and Janos, Matthew and Luke were in their beds. Remy was on the far end of the roof, awake and pacing, as restless as Azazel himself.

Azazel was not sure why he headed for Erik now, but perhaps it was something to do with what Mystique had said – that he should ask Erik about Shaw and the Nazis – that lead him out into the courtyard.

Emma had argued once that Azazel possessed a type of low-level telepathy, and that this was how he found others, but Azazel did not believe that this was exactly correct. He could visualize where other people were, yes, but his ability told him nothing of what they were thinking or feeling.

Azazel did not know, for example, that it was perhaps a bad time to be approaching Erik until he saw him, sitting crouched over on the bench in the courtyard, a green bottle and a tumbler sitting beside him. By then it was too late to change course.

In the bright light of the full moon, Erik turned to look at him. He picked up the bottle by its neck and shifted to the end of the bench to make room, and Azazel sat down beside him.

Azazel looked down at the unmarked grave, where they had buried the Mutant child from Argentina. Fallen leaves had carpeted much of the courtyard, but these had been cleared away from the still raw earth of the grave. A small pile of pebbles sat on the surface of the grave.

"Who keeps putting those there?" Azazel wondered out-loud, motioning to the stones with one hand.

Instead of answering the question, Erik said, "It's late, Azazel. Why are you still awake?"

"It's afternoon in Australia," Azazel observed. The joke drew from Erik a short-lived smile that was as much a grimace. "I can't sleep," he went on, truthfully. "My mind is too busy and my stomach..." he paused, hunting for the correct word, "is tender."

"You mean you have a stomachache?"

"Not exactly," Azazel said, searching for the right expression. "But there are bugs in it."

"Butterflies, Azazel. You mean that you have butterflies in your stomach."

"Yes," Azazel agreed. "I think that I must be scared."

Erik's smile now was rueful. "You think you're scared," he repeated, "but you aren't sure?"

"I'm not used to this," Azazel, to whom fear was an almost completely alien concept, said defensively. "I'm not usually afraid of anything, you know. More usually, I am the thing that other people are scared of – the thing that _makes_ them be frightened. Fear is for our enemies, not for me." And he said again, "I am not used to this at all."

Erik tipped back his glass. From the label on the bottle, Azazel saw that he was drinking Irish whiskey.

"It is because of the baby," Erik observed, his voice neutral and somehow detached. It seemed to Azazel that he was very drunk – the bottle was half empty – yet he could detect no slur to Erik's voice. "You don't know what's going to happen – if you'll be able to keep them safe. That's why you are scared, Azazel."

Azazel nodded firmly and said, "I think that you're right." He eyed the bottle of whiskey. "It's not good to drink alone."

"That's true enough," Erik said, getting to his feet. He went inside, returning a few minutes later with a second tumbler. He poured and passed the glass to Azazel. "It's completely natural, in any case, that you are afraid. Most men feel the same way, when they're given this type of news."

Azazel downed the contents of his glass and held it out to Erik for a refill. "I can't even say that it's irrational, this fear, especially in our case," Erik went on, and Azazel understood that _our case_ to mean Mutants, and felt the power that was behind it, the strength that came when people recognized their common interests and stood together.

"Frankly, the fact of the matter is that you very well might not be able to protect them," Erik continued, and Azazel deflated as the fear came creeping back. He threw his glass back, trying to drown it in whiskey. "We're living in a dangerous and hostile world, after all, but at least you're not alone. None of you will be alone.

"We're with our people here, Azazel. We're family. We'll look after each other, keep each other safe from danger. It won't be like –" Erik came to a sudden halt. He stared bleary into the bottom of his empty glass. "My apologies," he said. "I believe I've had a bit too much to drink."

"It won't be like what?"

Erik waved the question away. He answered in a voice that was filled with forced joviality, and what he said had no relationship to what Azazel had asked. "I've got to say though, I'm having difficulty picturing you as a papa."

It was meant as a joke, Azazel knew, but he found that he could not treat it as such. "I know," he said, looking down at his hands. They were big hands, heavy and calloused, and he'd never stopped long enough to count how many men he'd killed with them. Soldier's hands, hands that were trained in one trade, meant to weld a blade or a gun. He couldn't see how they might be taught to cradle an infant.

"You aren't thinking of leaving?" Erik asked him.

" _Nyet,_ " Azazel scowled, offended, shaking his head sharply. "It's only that I am scared."

He paused, thinking, then said, "Erik, how do you know about baby? It was meant to be a secret... But Emma told you, I suppose."

Erik shook his head. "I guessed it for myself," he told Azazel. "So far as conspirators go, the two of you aren't exactly subtle, what with all the whispering about nappies and cribs."

Azazel held his glass out again, and Erik refilled it. He swirled the liquor in his tumbler, thinking. "Irish whiskey?" he asked, curious.

"Mother's milk," Erik confirmed, and if Azazel had had a finer ear for accents he would have heard the brogue that had come into Erik's voice.

 _Ask Erik about Shaw,_ Mystique had said to him, but he was not sure where to begin.

He liked Erik very much, but he knew so little about him, and Erik seemed to prefer things that way. Azazel knew that he was German, from his name and because some of the others had said as much, and because it was occasionally obvious, in the way Erik spoke and moved and sat.

And he knew that Erik was Jewish, because he had made a point of mentioning this to Azazel the day after they had left Cuba, dropping the fact like a hand-grenade into the middle of what had been a casual conversation and then watching Azazel intently, face expressionless but eyes steely, to see if he would make a problem from it.

At the time, Erik's suspicion had felt like an insult, and an outrageous one at that, given that he was the one who had so recently killed one of their own. It seemed Azazel that _Erik_ should be the one to prove himself trustworthy, and he had snapped, "Do I look like White Army to you? We're all Mutants here – this should be all that matters." And if the answer had not satisfied Erik completely – if the argument had struck him as backwards or inadequate – he had at least seemed to accept its sincerity, and things had moved more easily between them after that.

This was the balance of what Azazel knew of Erik's origins, aside from one other thing; this was that the fascists hated Jews even more than the White Army had, and that the Nazis had tried very hard to wipe them out, the same way the humans would doubtlessly try to destroy the Mutant race if they were ever given half a chance. But here he was blurry on the details; Azazel's grasp of contemporary history was weak to begin with, and in the year 1962 the specter of the Holocaust did not occupy the same prominence in the world's collective consciousness that it would in later decades.

"I would have thought schnapps," Azazel said now, awkwardly, trying to make an opening. "Or beer. Because you are German, _da_?"

Erik spread his hands. "My passport disagrees with you on that matter," he said. "I'm a naturalized citizen of the Republic of Ireland, that's what it says. Even if the bloody thing isn't worth the paper it's printed on, now that the CIA has my name.

"I was only fourteen when the war ended, Azazel, and I didn't stick around afterward."

Azazel nodded; he'd been fourteen, give or take a couple of years, when he'd first gone to war, though that had been a different war.

Erik looked up at the sky. "What did you come here to talk to me about, Azazel?"

"Shaw," Azazel said, so that was what they talked about.

But first they started at the beginning; with Erik's father, who had disappeared late in 1936, and the neighbors had whispered that he'd run off, abandoned the family, but Erik always knew that was a lie, that his father never would have left them behind, so he must have been murdered; of the ghetto; of his sisters, who – small mercy – had been taken by typhus just weeks before the trains began to roll for Auschwitz, of dancing a sewing pin across the table for them without touching it – the trick didn't always work, he couldn't always make it work, but when it did how they _smiled_ at him; of the train; of the KZ; and of Shaw.

And Azazel listened with a rising horror, because though he had known that humans were capable of great brutality, and had never held himself as being too good to match them on their own terms, he had never conceived of so many of the things Erik was telling him now. Azazel was no pacifist, and he was not inclined to shy away from violence, even on a massive scale, but neither was he a planner; he was a berserker on the field of battle, and there was little that was calculated about his mode of violence. And it was the calculation of the thing that shocked him now, the impersonal and methodical manner in which one group of humans had targeted their own species.

And with the horror came shame; shame that he had followed Shaw, who had been part of this massive mechanized death machine and who had hurt a Mutant child so badly, and shame that he had not somehow seen through Shaw, had not understood and had not believed when Janos and Mystique both had tried to tell him the truth.

"I didn't know of these things," he insisted now. "Erik – I am no fascist. I would have killed Shaw myself if I had known of these things."

"I know it," Erik said. Above them, the sky had gone from black to navy blue; dawn was breaking, slow but sure. "You would have tried, away. That's why I can work with you, Azazel; you're vicious but your heart's in the right place.

"The same thing is true of Janos. He means well, though he's a coward who chooses the most inopportune moments to try to force himself into bravery."

"Emma's the problem," Azazel said, putting it together as he said it; Emma had known everything – she must have known it all and more – but she had still followed Shaw. She had known, and she had not told Azazel.

"Emma was a problem when she first joined us," Erik allowed, "but I think the situation is under control now." There were only two fingers of whiskey left in the bottle, and Erik poured half of it into his own glass and half into Azazel's before going on.

"Emma had me badly off-balance, when we were first starting out," Erik explained, picking his words carefully. "She was very insistent that I needed to be a Mutant above all else; otherwise, none of you would follow me. A Mutant and nothing else – not German or Irish, and not a Jew, and not a homophile." He paused, studying Azazel, and he felt again that he was being tested. "You know what that word means – 'homophile?'"

"I know it," he said, waving the question away with annoyance, though in actual fact he had never heard it before, and was only guessing its meaning from context. "I know about Xavier, and this makes no difference to me. It doesn't matter."

"It absolutely matters," Erik replied coolly, and Azazel understood that he had just made a very bad mistake. "It matters because it's all one thing – _I_ am one thing, and I can't just take myself apart into different pieces – but my error was that I didn't see that at first. For a while I was stupid enough to go along with Emma – to defer to her experience, if you will – to attempt to take her instructions.

"I tried to remake myself completely. It didn't work. Azazel – I didn't know who I was for a while there, and it made me less than useless. That's why we didn't get anything done in those first two months – I didn't have any direction because I wasn't using where I'd been to our advantage. Raven finally snapped me out of it, thank god.

"It cost us time, and I regret that, but I think I'm on the right track now."

"That's good," Azazel said, uncertainly. In actual fact, Erik had said more than Azazel could make sense of at the moment, as distracted and exhausted and drunk as he was. He wondered if usually spoke to his friends in this manner, or if it was the drink that made him so open and so verbose. That they were friends now Azazel did not doubt – they had drunk together, hadn't they?

"You think I'm talking like this to you now because I'm drunk," Erik said, as though he had read Azazel mind. "And I am drunk – I am more drunk than I have any right being right now, and I am going to regret it tomorrow." He stood, a bit unsteadily. "But that has nothing to do with anything I've said here tonight.

"There isn't a shred of cheap pity in you, Azazel. That's why I know you won't use what I've told you against me later. You wouldn't know how to turn what I've said into an effective weapon.

"I actually like beer quite a bit," he went on.

"Guinness?" Azazel suggested.

"Piss water," Erik said dismissively. "Though don't go repeating that, please - Dublin will revoke my citizenship.

"No, _Deutsch Bier ist das Beste_."

And on that note, he left Azazel alone in the courtyard. After a few minutes, Azazel stood and took himself back to bed.


	39. Chapter 39

_"For nothing is fixed, for ever and for ever and forever, it is not fixed; the earth is always shifting, the light is always changing, the sea does not cease to grind down rock. Generations do not cease to be born, and we are responsible to them because we are the only witnesses they have. The sea rises, the light fails, lovers cling to each other, and children cling to us. The moment we cease to hold each other, the moment we break faith with one another, the sea engulfs us and the light goes out." - James Baldwin_

_"You cannot save people, you can only love them." - Anaïs Nin_

* * *

Janos had cleaned up the mess in the common room as well as could be expected, but the smell of scorched wallpaper and burnt carpeting still hung heavily in the air.

Passing by the room on his way upstairs, Erik didn't bother to pretend that it was the whiskey that made his stomach roil the way it did at the scent of that smoke.

_Anya..._

It had been eight years ago tonight, and he wondered if Magda was still looking after the grave. Erik thought that she would be. Magda had never been the type to let that sort of thing fall by the wayside.

Erik supposed that if he requested as much, Azazel would take him to visit the place where they'd buried Anya, and that he wouldn't ask too many questions about it. But tonight it seemed enough to keep watch over the grave of Mutant child.

In his mind, Anya and child from Argentina had begun to... not exactly overlap – that would have been entirely impossible – but to seem like two parts of the same thing, different faces on the same coin, though he would never even know if the Mutant had had a name, and Anya may well have been human.

Erik wondered if he'd end up burying more children before everything was said and done, and decided that this was more likely than not. That thought made him wish that he hadn't been so generous in sharing his whiskey with Azazel; he was drunk but it wouldn't have hurt to be drunker.

Children.

First, they'd picked up that boy – Todd, apparently, though there was some argument as to that – with the glassy eyes that had seen too much that was ugly. Erik was still fighting the urge to turn him over to Charles, as the other man wanted. His motivation to do so felt too much like fear – like he only wanted to foist the responsibility for his care and safety onto someone else – and he did not want fear to dictate his actions.

And now this; a second child on the way.

Erik wished... not exactly that Mystique and Azazel had waited longer before getting pregnant, he supposed, because that probably wouldn't have made much of a difference – the struggle to which the Brotherhood was dedicated would be a long one after all, not anything that any of the could hope to complete in their own lifetimes (though he wondered how many of the others understood that), and in the meantime life must go on. But he would have liked to be able to guarantee the two of them _something_ , as futile as he understood that wish to be.

Erik didn't have much experience with having friends, and maybe it was only the drink talking, but he thought those two were his –

He nearly collided with Remy on the stairs.

The other man was dressed in his ankle-length duster, and there was something both furtive and defiant in his bearing that told Erik that he was on his way out, even before Remy opened his mouth to tell him, "Ol' Gambit's just be leavin' here now, and you ain't gunna stop 'im."

This wasn't exactly surprising news; Emma had already told Erik that the Cajun had tried to get her to leave with him on his second day in Chicago, and he'd tried to pull the same trick with Angel earlier that very day.

Erik rolled his eyes at Remy. "What, you running off just because Janos socked you one?" he asked, baiting. Janos had given Remy one hell of a shiner, Erik noted. He supposed that they should all count themselves lucky that Janos had exercised enough self-control to use his fist rather than his ability, or else they might still be scrapping Remy off the wall.

"Dat don't got nothin' ta do wit' it," Remy said. He'd been slouching before, but now he stood up to his full height. "I guess I dunno what ya'll are tryin' ta do here 'xactly– nobody wants to give me a straight answer on dat – but I can tell e'nuff to know dat I don't want anythin' ta do wit' it.

"Dis thing here, dis all ain't gonna end wit' anything but hurt an' blood an' death. But I sorta got a feelin' dat ya see dat for ya own self."

Erik really saw no point in denying that. "That's a fact of which I'm very much aware, actually," he said.

Remy's expression at that was one of honest bafflement. Erik knew that he had decided for himself at some point or another that Erik was the bad guy – someone that the others, and especially the women – needed saving from. Erik supposed that Remy had not expected agreement.

Remy's intentions were only good, and Erik understood that perfectly. He understood also that this was a fact that made Remy uniquely dangerous; that type of goodhearted naivete could put at risk everything they were working for here.

It was probably a good thing that Remy was leaving, but Erik felt beholden to at least explain to him where he had gone wrong.

"What you've failed to realize," Erik went on, "is that things are apt to end on exactly the same terms for you – irregardless of whether or not you stay – and that the only difference that your leaving will make is that whereas we are going to be prepared, you will be alone when _they_ come for you, so it's that much more likely that the results will be your pain, your blood, your death.

"But go if you're going." He stepped to the edge of the stairs, clearing the way for Remy.

"Just remember," Erik called down at Remy's back, as the other man started down the stairs, "that we'll take you when you're ready to come back. You know where to find us."

Remy paused on the landing, and Erik thought that he might turn and say something. But then he continued on, hurrying now, as though he feared being stopped. And Erik turned his back and continued on to his room.

Four years later, when everything went to hell, when so many of the Brotherhood were dead or scattered and they didn't even have little Kurt's body to bury it, Erik would decide for himself that he'd made an unforgivable mistake on this night, that he never should have allowed Remy to leave without having Emma wipe his memory first. It was true that by then no less than a hundred Mutants would know where the Brotherhood's various headquarters were located, so in actual fact it was impossible to say who had turned SHIELD onto them with any certainty.

But something in his gut would always tell Erik that it had been Remy – that he hadn't been made to inform on them willingly or easily, but that in the end he had talked.

And Erik would wounder what had happened to Remy – what SHIELD had done with them when they'd gotten what they wanted, if he was still alive – but that was a question to which Erik would never know the answer.


	40. Chapter 40

_Everybody has a home team: It's the people you call when you get a flat tire or when something terrible happens. It's the people who, near or far, know everything that's wrong with you and love you anyways. These are the ones who tell you their secrets... who cry when you cry. These are your people, your middle-of-the-night, no-matter-what people. - Shauna Niequist_

_There is a sense even in which we do share the same faith... We are in the same struggle and we need each other. We need to take strength from each other, and we need to learn from each other. - Barbara Deming_

**Chapter Forty**

Three months earlier, when Mystique went to Erik to discuss the matter of the baby, she'd felt half a child herself. She'd known already that he knew she was pregnant – Azazel had told her that – so there was no reason to think that Erik would feel blindsided by the news. But Erik had a talent for making other feel naïve and foolish when it suited him, and she'd been so worried that he'd act that way over this that she hadn't been able to avoid asking, "You aren't... mad at me?"

But Erik had acted cheerful about it, had told her that it was important that they should have children, that children were the future, after all, and if there had been reservations – or something very much like dread – in his eyes, Mystique did her best to pretend that she didn't see it there.

Erik even offered to go with her to her prenatal appointments, but Mystique had demurred; there was something about the idea of having Erik taken for her husband that made her uncomfortable. She worried also that it might make Azazel unhappy, since he did not have the option of accompanying her to the appointments.

Azazel had only rarely expressed discontent over his inability to move freely in human society – she supposed that he was disinclined to brood too much over things that couldn't be changed – and the only sign that he felt as though he was missing anything laid in his eagerness to enjoy the company of other Mutants. But the question of the rest of the world had been on Mystique's mind a lot recently, especially when she thought about the baby and its future. Sometimes she hoped that the baby's ability would be an invisible one, like Erik's or Charles's, or that it would inherent her own talent for blending in, but then she wondered if that was really the type of thought she should be having, if it was backwards or unworthy or bad.

It seemed to Mystique that, as a physically mutated individual who was capable of passing as human, she was in a unique position to see the possibilities for fissures and resentments to arise between the human-looking Mutants and those all along the spectrum of visibly mutated, and she made a conscience effort not to exasperate these potential tensions. So she'd gone to the appointments alone, matching her face to a stolen ID and paying in cash.

For the doctor's appointments – and now that the pregnancy was really starting to show, whenever she went outside – Mystique manifested a wedding band on her finger. There was no question of marriage – of going to a court house or a church on Azazel's arm – and they had not so much as discussed it. But when it came to dealing with outsiders it was better to avoid awkward questions.

Exactly what they were going to do when it was time for the baby to be born was in some ways still an open question, but Mystique was pretty sure that it would be okay. Emma had promised to use her ability to manage things at the hospital, and there would always be Charles if she needed someone to fall back on.

She was still trying to get used to the idea of seeing Charles again.

There was so much that had changed since Cuba that she wasn't sure what she would do when Christmas finally rolled around next week. There was her belly, first of all, growing bigger every day. They'd discussed the baby – or rather, she'd told Charles about the baby and he'd gushed on excitedly about it. During their phone conversations, Mystique had found that it was easiest on almost every topic to just let Charles carry the discussion; there was less chance that she might say something inadmissible that way. And he seemed happy just to have her as a listener, so this was easy enough.

She'd tried once or twice to bring up Azazel, but on that topic Charles was less verbose; he tended to turn stiff in a way that she thought might be meant to conceal disapproval, or perhaps fear or confusion. She couldn't tell what he was really thinking – Mystique had always been good at reading him, but on this she was in the dark, and maybe that was the best thing. There was nothing she wanted to argue with Charles about less than her relationship with Azazel.

And then there was the matter of the chair... She didn't know how she was supposed to deal with it – should she pretend it wasn't there, ask him questions about it, let him know how sad she was over what had happened, tell him that he was adjusting well, do something else? She didn't know, and time was running out for her to figure it out.

She wished Erik was more willing to discuss Charles's condition – he'd been to see Charles in person several times since Cuba, so he must have had some idea about what she should do – but whenever she tried to bring it up Erik turned distant and changed the topic.

Erik did not, Mystique was coming to understand, deal well with grief or guilt. Over the last few days it seemed to Mystique especially that something was eating at him, though she couldn't say exactly what, she assumed it was the prospect of the group trip to New York, which was meant to include Fred and Toad as well as Erik, herself and Azazel. Erik had been going on a lot of walks, leaving the headquarters at odd hours, and that usually meant that he was making phone calls, though not necessarily to Charles. He'd had an entire life before the Brotherhood, after all, just like the rest of them, and there were bound to be plenty of people in his past that Mystique knew nothing about.

He'd left on one of those walks half an hour ago; Mystique had seen him leave while she was sitting on the couch in the common room, untangling Christmas lights.

They'd found the Christmas decorations in a storage room months ago, and since they had a little kid around now, Mystique had decided to put them to good use.

Azazel had been a bit dubious at first, as he was toward all social functions to which he did not already know the rules, but once Mystique had explained how Christmas was done in America – and invited him to include any traditions he might have brought from Russia or Spain – he got behind the idea. When she'd sent him off for a tree, he'd left with an ax and returned shortly afterward with an over-ambitiously large fir.

Fred had supported the idea at once, also citing Toad as a justification for celebrating.

On the other hand, the boy which the others were using as an excuse for their own nostalgic sentimentalism has shown only a tentative interest in the proceedings. They'd been working to put up the tree for almost an hour now, and Toad had spent most of the time crouched bare-foot on the back of a stuffed chair (he seemed to like high places, Mystique reflected), watching the three adults with a sort of dull suspicion, as though he was worried that they'd gone crazy but that at least it was a type of crazy that was vaguely interesting.

Even though Toad was sitting on the back of the chair, Fred had to bend over to get anywhere close to his level. "Hey kid, you wanna help me put the star on the top?" he asked, holding out the wire and silk Christmas star.

The boy had refused to answer to 'Todd,' not matter how often Fred claimed that it was his name now. Fred, on the other hand, had refused to call him 'Toad,' insisting angrily that, "That isn't no real name – it's just something someone mean said to make fun of him." Erik, Azazel and Mystique had all at times put out arguments of differing intensities and from various angles in favor of allowing the boy to go by whatever name he chose for himself, but Fred stood stubborn on the point. Since then Toad had become to him 'kid' or 'boy' or very occasionally 'son,' though Fred became awkward with embarrassment when that word slipped his lips.

Now Toad's huge black pupils flicked lazily from Fred to the tree and back again. "You're tall enough to do it yourself," he said.

"Yeah, and so what?" Fred demanded. "This is for fun."

Toad didn't seem convinced on that point, but he took the star in one hand and jumped onto Fred's shoulders. He stretched his thick arm out toward the tip of the tree, and Toad scrambled along it, planting the star at the top of the tree, and if it sat a little crooked up there, so what? It was for fun.

He hopped down onto the floor, landing beside Azazel, who was busy hanging ornaments. Acting on some sudden mischievous impulse, Toad snatched a candy cane from one of the lower boughs and hung it over the end of Azazel's tail. He bounced away quickly, landing on the couch beside Mystique then whirling around to watch Azazel, grinning a wide-mouth grin but cringing at the same time. Even after all these months, Toad still often seemed to expect to be hurt; Mystique didn't think that this was something that would go away quickly, if ever.

Azazel drew his tail in and unhooked the candy cane. "You are being clown," he said to Toad, not without approval. Any type of childish silliness was a good sign, so far as the boy went.

"So what do you think, Toad," Azazel went on, stooping to return the candy cane to where it belonged, "are you going to have a little sister or brother?"

Toad pivoted his head to look at Mystique. "You aren't my real Mom," he informed her. This was something he said to her almost every day, and Mystique didn't hold it against him, though the repetition was trying. She understood exactly how he felt, though she'd never been able to afford to tell Charles's mother as much.

"Nope," she agreed lightly, like she always did. "Not unless you want me to be."

To whom Toad really belonged was still something of an open question. Fred had the biggest claim over the boy, and in all major questions related to his care the others tended to defer to him. But a large portion of the responsibility for Toad had also fallen to Mystique, which she supposed made since, since aside from Fred the boy seemed to like her best – all objections to the idea of her becoming his mother aside – and since she had another little one coming anyway. This also brought Toad into Azazel's orbit quite frequently, a fact which he had accepted with aplomb, though most of the Brotherhood had taken their turns babysitting him now and again.

"Yeah, but ain't we all family here?" Fred asked. Then he blushed, a furious red, embarrassed at himself for having displayed such a vulnerable sentiment. The problem with Fred, Mystique had come to understand, was that his emotions – his loves and his hates and his hurts and fears and joys – were as big as the rest of him, and he knew them to be huge and incongruously, yet it was not within his power make his feelings any smaller.

Mystique nodded in affirmation, and was about come to his rescue, when Azazel spoke up instead. "That's right," he agreed, "and it reminds me of something. He looked to Mystique. "I will be back soon," he promised, and disappeared with a loud pop and a cloud of smoke.

"Just about gives me a heart attack every time he does that," Fred complained, after he was gone.

A few minutes after Azazel left, Toad seemed to get bored with the entire business. He wandered away, and Fred watched him go, a worried frown on his face.

"He ain't even excited about Christmas," Fred told her. "How's that natural for a kid, not to be excited about Christmas?"

Mystique shrugged. "I don't think he's ever done this before – maybe he doesn't know to expect presents and candy and stuff." She tried to remember if she'd ever celebrated a holiday or gotten a present before Charles – for Christmas or her birthday or anything – but the time before she'd meant Charles was nothing more than a fuzzy blank.

"I guess," Fred said, scowling. "You know, sometimes I think about that kid's parents, and I just get so angry that I wanna – I just want to go and murder them or something."

"I know what you mean," Mystique said. There had been a great deal of debate between Azazel and Erik on the matter of Toad's parents, in the days following his 'adoption.' Azazel had been all for hunting the boy's parents down and killing them if they could be found, but Erik had been of the option – as much as he agreed that they had deserved to die for mistreating and selling the child – that Toad might not thank them for it later. Azazel had eventually come over to Erik's way of thinking, allowing that if Toad felt as though he had any debts to settle with his parents once he'd gotten old enough to make those types of judgments for himself, the matter could be attended to then.

Mystique had stayed out of it; she did not trust herself to be impartial on the subject.

She stood now, pressing one hand against her belly as she rose. The pregnancy was about five months along, and over the last couple of weeks the baby bump had really started to show. "I'm getting huge," she told Fred, "and I can't hide it either." She demonstrated, transforming to fit the old Raven skin; the baby bump was still there, visible even under the manifestation of a baggy black sweater.

"How about if you turned into a guy?" Fred suggested, adding quickly, "Just don't try it if it might hurt the kid or something."

Mystique had already changed, and he smiled at Fred with Erik's face, showing all his teeth, the same way Erik smiled. Below Erik's broad chest, the baby bump sat like an over-sized beer gut.

Mystique turned back into herself.

"Bet if you turned into me that'd hide it," Fred told her.

"Yeah, I guess so," Mystique agreed, but she didn't quite dare to try it; she wasn't sure if she could actually make herself that much bigger. Like with Luke and Matthew, Fred was another Mutant she didn't think that she could copy.

The baby was kicking – she hoped it didn't mind all that shifting around – and Mystique reached out and took Fred's hand. "Here," she said. "You wanna feel it? Just be real careful."

"Okay," he said, uncertainly, letting her rest the edge of his palm against her belly. His hands were big enough that they could have encircled her waist all the way around, even with the growing baby bump.

They waited, and after about a minute the baby squirmed under his hand. "Wow," Fred breathed, his eyes growing wide as saucers. " _Oh wow_ , that's something else, isn't it?"

"It is, isn't it?" Mystique said, trying not to sound smug.

Fred straightened, took a step back. "It'll be good for there to be another kid around here for Todd to play with – I mean, I know he's going away to the school and all that, but during the summers, right?" On Fred's face, even a worried frown looked like a scowl. "You guys are sure this school thing is a good idea, right?"

Mystique hesitated. The truth was, she had now idea how Charles' plan to open a school for 'gifted young people' was going to play out, but she suspected that he might have bitten off more than he could chew. What did Charles know about kids, anyway? But it seemed disloyal to say so, so she said, "Yeah, I think it's going to work out real well."

"Yeah," Fred said, "And I guess it'll be safer up there in New York for a kid, right? I mean, Xavier isn't going to be getting into the same stuff we're getting into, right? And there wouldn't be crazy folks blowing stuff up and all that."

Remy'd left the night after his fight with Janos, and in his absence the blame for what had happened had fallen on him, though it was common knowledge that Janos had thrown the first punch. It wasn't exactly fair, but Mystique figured that there was more impetus to make excuses for Janos's bad behavior than Remy's, since Remy had abandoned them.

However, she wasn't at sure that Fred's idea about there being less explosions at the school was actually correct; the word was that Charles's had recruited Alex's little brother, and that the boy, Scott, had an ability that was similar but more difficult to control than Alex's.

"Hey," Fred continued, "you going to send your kid to that Mutant school, when its old enough?"

Mystique hedged. "That's an awful long way off, isn't it?"

Before Fred could answer, Azazel returned in a poof of smoke. He'd brought with him a box of taper candles and something bigger, a package wrapped in brown paper. "Back again," he said, nodding acknowledgment to Mystique before turning toward the fireplace.

"What you got there?" Fred said, stepping after Azazel and stopping behind him at the mantelpiece. Mystique came around to his other side, peering over his shoulder at the package as Azazel sat it on the mantelpiece and began to unwrap it.

The paper came away to reveal a nine-armed candelabra. Azazel balled up the brown paper and tossed it into the empty fireplace, before adjusting the candelabra on the mantelpiece, eying its position critically. "For Erik," Azazel said, with the same formal formula he used to accompany the giving of any gift, large or small, "a menorah."

Mystique wasn't sure really, how she had come to this point in her life – what she had done to earn the right to call these people her people, to call this fearsome, thoughtful man her own man – but she had never been more sure that she was where she wanted to be than at that moment. "Oh Azazel," she said.

"Do you think that it is correct?" Azazel asked her, a worried frown pulling at the left side of his face. "I don't know how this is to be used."

"I think it looks good," Mystique said, without any real authority. "And Erik can show us how it works, right?"

"I hope that it's correct," Azazel said. "I don't like to make mistakes. But I thought that here we are having a tree, so we should also have menorah, right?"

A troubling thought struck Mystique. "Azazel," she asked slowly, "you didn't find that in anyone's house, or in a synagog or anything like that?"

"No," he said. "I took from warehouse, so it did not belong to anyone."

It wasn't strictly true that something taken from a warehouse didn't have an owner, but Azazel's ideas of property relations had always been foggy, and Mystique supposed that as long as there wasn't a family somewhere looking for their priceless heirloom it wasn't worth arguing about.

"Ah, here is Erik coming now," Azazel said. He stepped out of the common room, heading down the hallway, and was half-way to the front door before Erik even came through it. Mystique had fallen in beside him, with Fred a step behind them, so she saw Erik's expression when he came inside. The look on his face made her heart jump into her throat; she hadn't seen that type of cornered rage on Erik's features since Cuba.

When he saw the others watching him, Erik struggled to bring his emotions under his command, with limited success; he could make his face blank, but Mystique saw riots flaming up in his eyes. "Azazel," Erik said, "you're here – good. I need you to get Emma – right now, understand? We need to leave right away."

Azazel nodded sharply and disappeared in a cloud of smoke, no questions asked.

"What's the matter?" Mystique demanded. "Did something happened to Charles?"

"No – no," Erik said. She could see him making a visible effort to bring the panic into hand. "Nothing like that, my dear – no worries on that front.

"It's my uncle. He's been arrested."


	41. Chapter 41

" _The consequence of this racial purity, universally valid in Nature, is not only the sharp outward delimitation of the various races, but their uniform character in themselves. The fox is always a fox, the goose a goose, the tiger a tiger, etc... You will never find a fox who in his inner attitude might, for example, show humanitarian tendencies toward geese, as similarly there is no cat with a friendly inclination toward mice." – Adolf Hitler_  


" _Every word that comes from Hitler's mouth is a lie." – The White Rose, Fourth Leaflet_  


* * *

"Okay," Mystique said, in response to the news of the arrest. "Then we'll just get Azazel to break your uncle out." She said this matter-of-factly, with a calmness that she was surprised to find that she actually felt.

 _I'm learning how to do this work,_ she thought. They'd already done two prison breaks, after all, and if neither had gone off painlessly they had at least managed to rescue their targets in both cases. This was starting to feel like old hat.

"No need," Erik responded. "He's already been let out, and he's back home – I've just been on the phone with him." He explained that both he and Kurt had known that the apartment was being watched, though not by who, and that he'd tried to talk the old man into coming to Chicago to join them – to talk him into going anywhere else – but that Kurt had refused.

Mystique wondered what the others would have thought of that plan – especially Emma. She was not sure, really, that she herself would have been willing to have a human under their roof, Erik's blood or not. _Could we have been anything like ourselves around this man? Could we have trusted him?_

"I need to go to Ireland," Erik finished. "You'll come with me? I need someone who won't..." He didn't seem sure how to finish, but Mystique thought she understood what was meant. Erik wanted someone who would not hold the old man against him, who would stand with him against Emma.

Emma was going to be trouble. Mystique understood at once why Erik needed to take her along, but she could already see that Emma would be trouble.

"Okay," she told him, transforming. Not into the Raven skin – she tried to avoid using that one, and not just for security reasons – but into a new form, a brunette with a heart-shaped face who she'd seen on the train a few days previous. It was an anonymous form, one which she did not expect to have need of in any future situation. The baby bulge, predictably, stayed where it was when she manifested a sweater to cover it.

"Thank you for the thought, my dear," Erik said in a voice which she couldn't quite read, "but I don't think that will be necessary."

"It's okay – I don't mind," Mystique said, and it wasn't exactly a lie. She'd found that hiding didn't bother her nearly as much as it had used to, now that they were working toward a world were none of them would have to hide anymore. And anyway, it just seemed easier.

Emma and Azazel returned then, appearing in the hall with a crack, and Azazel stepped to Mystique's side without commenting on her appearance.

When Erik turned to address them, Mystique saw that both the panic and vulnerability of earlier was gone from him. In its place there was a black rage.

"The government – it doesn't really matter which one, though I mean to find that out – is onto us," he began. "They've snatched my only living relative off the streets, held him against his will, terrorizing a crippled old man, and all of this was an attack on Mutant by proxy. They went after him to get at me – they mean to frighten me, to turn me ineffectual, to make me hesitate before taking action against them, but it isn't going to work. I am going to find out who did this – you all are going to help me to find out – and then the people responsible are going to bleed."

Azazel nodded his approval slowly, an eager and vicious grin tugging on the left-side of his face. He was ready and waiting for a fight, Mystique saw; that was a fact about him that still frightened her sometimes. Emma, on the other hand, looked supremely unimpressed by Erik's speech.

Erik explained to Azazel where Kurt's apartment was, and they joined hands, a moment later they were there, inside an empty bedroom.

"I will go now," Azazel said, dropped Mystique's and Erik's hands. "Emma will whistle when you are finished here, yes?"

"No – please stay," Erik said, and Mystique understood something suddenly. _He wants Azazel – and he wanted me, blue – as a way of testing the old man. He needs to know how his uncle Kurt will react to us._ It made her uneasy.

Azazel nodded, but with much less certainty than he'd shown when the topic had been blood; the killing of enemies was a simple matter for him, but meeting a comrade's relative was an entirely different question.

"Just wait here a minute," Erik continued, stepping toward the door. "I'm going to tell my uncle that we're here, I don't want to surprise him too badly, just showing up here like this –" but while he was still looking over his shoulder at the others the bedroom door opened.

The family resemblance was obvious at first glance; the old man was a smaller, wizened version of Erik. Kurt was much shorter, and he was boney where the other was muscular, and his hair was mostly gray and receding, but they had clearly been cut from the same mold. _He has Erik's eyes,_ Mystique realized, the same gold-flecked green that sometimes looked blue and sometimes gray, so difficult to mimic.

Kurt gripped a cane in his left hand, but did not lean on it – there was something about the way that he held it that made Mystique think that it was meant more as a weapon than as a means of getting around. His right arm was gone above the elbow, the sleeve of his housecoat cut short and pinned up.

She watched those eyes, so like Erik's, as they stopped short on Azazel, but his gaze lingered there only for an instant. Then the old man leaned the cane against the door frame and came forward, catching Erik up in a one-armed embrace. Erik curled his own arms around Kurt's bent back, as awkward as a teenager under the eyes of the others.

"I've missed you," Erik told him.

"It's because you never visit," the old man said back.

"It seemed safer not to. I didn't want to chance attracting attention to you."

"Ach, too late for that now, eh?" Kurt responded, with a light bravado that seemed as fragile and worn down as he looked.

"I'm sorry that this happened."

"Couldn't be avoided," Kurt said, stepping back. "And in any case, it's hardly your fault."

"No, but I'm going to see that those who are responsible pay for it."

Kurt waved his hand carelessly. "Maybe you'll introduce me to your friends first?"

Azazel came forward first, cupping Kurt's arthritic hand between his own two strong hands. "I know that Erik cares for you, and so it does not bother me that you are human," he said earnestly. The old man looked at him flatly, unblinking, and Azazel added, unnerved by the look, wondering if he'd made some misstep, "I am not demon."

"I never said that I thought you were," Kurt said back to him.

Erik hesitated over Mystique's name, seemingly uncertain as to what to call her – more often than not they used their old names between themselves, but was this something different? "This is... Mystique," he said finally.

When Mystique moved to shake his hand, Kurt drew her into a one-armed hug. She felt compelled to reciprocate, returning the embrace carefully; the old man seemed very frail, and she was afraid she might break him if she squeezed too tightly.

When they drew apart, Kurt stooped, hand on one knee, bringing himself eye-level to Mystique's belly. She had a sense that he had once been a large man – though perhaps not as big as Erik – but he was so shrunken with age that he did not need to lean over very far to do this. "I see you've got a little one coming."

"I do," Mystique said, smiling despite herself.

He turned his eyes, so like his nephew's, up at her. "Erik's?" he said, hopefully.

Azazel moved closer to Mystique and put a hand on her shoulder. "No," she said, absurdly sorry to disappoint him.

"Ah well," the old man said, straightening laboriously. "Maybe you'll name him after me anyway."

" _Uncle_ ," Erik said, horrified.

" _Max_ ," Kurt replied, in the same tone. He turned toward the door, picking up his cane as he went. "Let's have some tea, shall we?"

"I'll help you," Erik said, following after quickly.

Mystique caught him gently by the arm before he could disappear into the hallway after Kurt. "'Max?'" she repeated, confused.

"Max is my given name," he told her. "I'll explain later." And he slipped away.

Mystique and Azazel followed after them more slowly, Emma taking up their rear. Erik had not introduced her to the old man, Mystique noted.

The three of them came to a stop in the sitting room. On the other side of what Mystique assumed was the kitchen door, she could hear Erik and Kurt moving about and speaking to each other, their voices muffled by the door.

"We should wait here," Mystique decided, and Azazel sank down onto the couch, grateful that the decision had been made. Mystique sat down beside him, while Emma took a chair.

Mystique looked around to the cozy little room, waiting for Erik and Kurt to come back. There were pictures on the wall, and her eyes were draw to one in particular; Erik, ten years younger at least, his expression nowhere near as wolfish and hard as it was today, together with a brown-haired little girl and a woman with the largest eyes Mystique had ever seen. She wet her lips, wondering.

Azazel touched her elbow to draw her attention, pointing to a cabinet with his chin. There was a menorah on top of it. "See?" he said softly, sounding both pleased with himself and relieved. "I got right thing."

Erik and Kurt returned from the kitchen, the old man skillfully balancing a large tea tray on his hip while Erik held the door. He sat the tray down on the coffee table then lowered himself slowly down on the couch across from Mystique. Erik sat down next to him.

There was a large, white earthenware pot on the tray, and five teacups with saucers, none of which matched one another. The tray also held blueberry scones, a tiny jug of cream and another of milk, and four little bowls filled with sugar cubes, ground nuts, cinnamon, and powdered chocolate.

"So," Kurt began, pouring, "I always told Max that there had to be others like him, but he never believed me. But here you are." He looked up. "You are all... whatever it is you are, yes?"

"Mutants, yes," Mystique answered, taking a cup and saucer from Kurt. The missing arm did not seem to slow him down noticeably.

"And there you have it," Kurt said, turning his to Erik. "That's the same word the people who grabbed me were using for you, by the by," he added as an aside.

"Well, I couldn't wrap my head around the idea of being part of a whole new species overnight," Erik said. Mystique noted that the cadence of his speech had begun to match Kurt's. The brogue, which had disappeared completely from Erik's speech by the second week after Cuba, was thick now, though there was no sign of the faint German accent that underlied Kurt's words.

"When did I ever say anything about a new species?" Kurt demanded. "Of course Mutants aren't a new species – you can still have children with us, can't you?" Erik put his teacup down with a sharp clink and pushed it away, but Kurt kept on. The old man was angry, Mystique realized suddenly, and it was the same subtly venous anger that Erik could apply with such precision to neutralize dissent. "That's sloppy thinking, Max. It's not a difference between foxes and geese but of a white goose and a brown goose."

"I am more than just red goose," Azazel interjected, affronted.

Mystique cut in. "Janos said something like that to me," she said, looking from Kurt to Erik. "That Shaw used to talk about geese and foxes... or was it dogs and foxes?"

Erik snorted disgustedly. "Leave it to Shaw to misquote _Mein Kampf_ ," he said.

Kurt's eyes watched Mystique intently. "Shaw?"

"Schmidt," Erik clarified, flatly.

"I see," Kurt said, and Mystique could not have believed that there would be so much danger lurking in an old man's voice. "Are these Schmidt's old followers, then?"

It was Azazel who answered. "Emma and myself – yes," he admitted. "But no longer. All of that is over with."

"Is it?" Kurt asked, his eyes on Emma. She stared back at him, something below dismissive in her gaze, as though she barely deigned to see him there.

"Shaw is dead," Azazel said. "Erik killed him."

"I know it," the old man said. "I was happy to hear about it. He killed my sister, and god alone knows how many others."

Emma set her teacup down loudly, and some of the tea sloshed over the edge of the cup. "Can we get on with this?" she demanded.

"You haven't touched your tea," Kurt noted.

"I can't say that I'm thirsty, Emma replied, with icy courtesy.

"I know exactly what you're thinking," he told her, flatly.

"I doubt that," Emma answered.

"Don't think I haven't seen that look – that I haven't seen your type – a thousand times before." He turned to look at Erik. "This one imagines herself to be a fox." Erik didn't answer; his eyes were fixed on Emma, blazing with rage. "Let's get on with it then," Kurt said.

There wasn't that much to the story, at least not as Kurt told it. He'd been snatched while walking home from the green grocer's, politely invited by a man with a black suit and an inconspicuous gun to climb into an unmarked van. Two other men in black suits had waited inside.

They'd driven for quite a while – Kurt was not sure for just how long, as his watch had been taken away from him, along with his wallet and house keys – and when they'd finally stopped he'd been taken into a small and secluded country house.

"They were full of questions," Kurt continued, "and all of them about you and your friends, Max. Well, I couldn't have helped them if I'd wanted to – what do I know about your business, after all? It was smart that you were careful about that. I knew that you were in America, and that you'd found some more of your own kind, but they knew that much and more themselves. I'm afraid that they didn't find me to be very helpful."

His voice was light and flippant, but Mystique noticed that his hand shook when he lifted his teacup to his lips. A palsy brought on by old age, frayed nerves, bottled rage? Mystique couldn't say.

The men had held him for three days, whiling the time away by plying him with questions and promises and threats, and then it was back to the van. Then they had returned his property and let him go near the edge of the city, more or less no worse for wear.

"Did you see anything else – any clue as to who they might have been?" Erik pressed.

"They were Americans," Kurt told him with certainty, "but that's all that I could say."

"CIA?" Erik suggested, but the old man just shrugged.

Erik leaned across the table, bringing himself closer to Kurt. He motioned a hand toward Emma. "We each have our own abilities. Emma's gift is to read minds. If you'll allow it, I'd like for her to take a look at your memories of the last few days. There may be some clue as to who it was that kidnapped you there – something important that you saw but have since forgotten. It's not painful."

"Alright," Kurt agreed, nodding slowly. "Have her do what she needs to do."

"I finished with that half an hour ago," Emma said, speaking to Erik rather than Kurt. "He isn't hiding anything from us. He really doesn't know who kidnapped him."

"Emma," Erik said, his voice as light as the blade of Mystique's stiletto, "why don't you go wait in the guest room?"

"Gladly," Emma said, coming to her feet with all her customary poise and grace.

"She's a piece of work, isn't she?" Kurt said dryly, when the bedroom door had clicked shut.

"I can't afford to get rid of her, much as I'd like to," Erik said, by way of explanation. There was shame and frustration in his voice. "I'm afraid we can't make do without a telepath."

"Must be handy to have a mind-reader around," the old man allowed.

"If Emma had been around those government men wouldn't have gotten within five hundred yards of you."

"Does your little blue-eyed fox make a habit of coming to the rescue of geese?"

"I wish you'd stop," Erik said, his voice low and hoarse, and Mystique saw with astonishment that there were tears in his eyes.

"You're in trouble, Max," the old man said, shaking his head. "I can't tell you how sorry I am for that."

Erik knuckled angrily at his eyes. "Come back with us," he said. "I can protect you."

"I'm not the one who's in danger," Kurt told him, as gently as he could.

Erik let out a bark of outraged laughter. "How can you say that, when you were just kidnapped in front of your own –"

"I'm not the one in danger," Kurt repeated. "The fact that they let me go is evidence enough of that they can't do much to me. They couldn't hold me and they couldn't make me disappear –"

"They can do whatever they want," Erik said dismissive and angry all at once.

"Not to me," Kurt said, his voice still even. Erik was arguing but Kurt was only explaining the way things were, Mystique saw, and that was why Kurt was going to win. "I have my rights, and they're – more or less – protected under the law. And I'm useless to them, which I'll grant is probably the more important point.

"It's an entirely different matter for you lot," Kurt went on, flicking his hand to encircle Azazel and Erik and Mystique and Emma on the other side of the guest room door. "They've been thinking sloppy, too, those men who grabbed me, with the matter of foxes and geese, and they're horribly frightened that they're the geese. I think maybe they could do absolutely anything to a Mutant they had in their custody, and they want to have you and your friends here very badly, Max."

The old man's words chilled Mystique. One of her hands went to her belly, moving almost as though it had a mind of its own, and the other groped for Azazel's hand. He took her hand and squeezed it, so fiercely that it hurt, but it was a comforting sort of pain, and she squeezed back.

But strangely, Erik seemed heartened by what Kurt had said. It was only later that she realized that Erik might have found it reassuring to learn that the old man's assessment of situation was the same as his own, as pessimistic as it was. "I understand that," he said, and Mystique could see the steel come back into him.

Kurt turned to look at Azazel and Mystique, and she saw that there were tears threatening in his eyes as well, though they didn't fall. "Look at Edie's boy," he said fondly, his voice soft. "He's always been such a brave boy, such a smart boy, such a _good_ boy.

"Look after each other, won't you?" Kurt said.

Mystique nodded, her voice caught in her throat.

They left shortly after that.


	42. Chapter 42

" _Traumas we are not ready or not able to remember haunt us all the more forcefully. We should therefore accept the paradox that, in order to really forget an event, we must first summon up the strength to remember it properly." - Slavoj Žižek_  


* * *

When Azazel teleported the four of them back to the headquarters's hallway, Fred stuck his head out of the common room. "Where'd you guys get off to?" he demanded, stepping out into the hall.

Erik stalked away without answering, turning sideways to slip past Fred without breaking his stride. Fred hooked his thumb to point backwards at Erik. "What the hell's the matter with him?"

It was Emma who answered. "Oh," she told Fred lightly, "he's decided that I'm an anti-Semite. Of course, that isn't actually the case; if all humans are vermin – and they are – then why should I make distinctions between one type or another?"

Mystique never knew whether or not Erik turned back to them at that. Fred was between herself and Erik, blocking her view, and in any case she didn't stop to look. She didn't actually give Erik a chance to do whatever Erik might have done, because half a heart beat after Emma had spoken – before Mystique even really had time to think about it herself – her palm had arched its way through the space between them to strike Emma across the face. Flesh made contact with flesh with a loud _crack_.

In the wake of that, Fred said, "whoa," softly. Everything else was so silent that Mystique believed that she could hear her own heart beating.

Emma looked at her, blinking quickly with astonishment, her hand going slowly to her reddening cheek. There was shock in her eyes as her fingertips brushed against the skin gingerly, and then her cheek and the rest of her went to diamond, and her eyes turned just as hard and glittering as her skin.

And then Mystique was on her knees, hands clutched around the sides of her head, and there was shouting and screaming, a roar of noise so chaotic that she couldn't tell where any of it was something from, and her skin was pulsating, flickering from one form to another, and there were picture inside her head, a thousand different images and voices and scents and sensations, a mad whirlwind, more than she could bear –

One memory came into focus among the blur, and suddenly Mystique heard the sound of running water, felt big hands – big hands attached to someone so much bigger than she was, someone she _knew_ – hauling her up by her arms, felt the shock of cold water as it engulfed her, while a second person reached under her father's arms, grasping the back of her neck, pinching, pushing her under, and the water burned like flames in her lungs, and she was kicking, thrashing, fighting to get free of all those hands –

And the hands fell away, and there was a _thump_ and a meaty _crack!_ – much different from the sound her hand had made against Emma's face – and a woman began to scream.

And then something snapped, audibly, inside her skull, and Mystique thought to herself, _I thought I'd forgotten, but I've known all along._

She must have. Why else would she have left Charles to join Erik's deadly band, if she hadn't known herself to be a killer all along?

The pain was gone, though the roaring inside her head still persisted, the flood of memories still rushing through her skull like waters released from behind a breached dam. Mystique looked up, saw that Erik was at Emma's side, his hand clenched around her shimmering forearm, jerking at it; she could see a smear of blood where he'd cut himself on her skin, so like the crimson against white that she'd seen in the unlocked memory. He was shouting at Emma, but Mystique couldn't make out what he was saying.

And then a hand tightened over her shoulder, evoking those other hands – her parents hands and the water – and Mystique tried to jerk away, but a second hand locked around her wrist, and she saw that it was red – as red as blood on porcelain tile – and then the others were gone, and the two of them were alone in Azazel's room, the air redolent with the smell of incense, the red silk hanging wafting faintly in the smoky haze.

Azazel tried to lead her toward the bed, but Mystique broke away – she'd figured out that she was stronger than him a while ago, and now she knew that she'd always been stronger than she had any right to be. "I'm okay," she told him, not because it was true but because she didn't want to be touched. She sat herself on the edge of the bed.

The roaring inside her head had reduced itself to a low throb, but all the old memories were still there, unlocked and waiting for her. Mystique thought it might take weeks for her to examine them all.

When she'd pushed Azazel away from her, he had turned and begun to pace the room like a caged tiger, and he was pacing still, growling curses under his breath in Russian. Now he wheeled, as though he'd reached a sudden decision, and reached to take his swords down from the wall.

Mystique exploded at him. "Don't be stupid," she snapped, and Azazel's hand stopped short of the first blade. He turned back to look at her, baffled. "Don't you even – she'll drop you dead within a heart beat."

She could tell from his expression that Azazel had not, in his rage, even stopped to consider this potentiality. He seemed to weigh the danger for a moment, before dismissing it. "I'm fast enough, I think. I could –"

"No you aren't and no you couldn't," she said flatly. There was no room to be gentle with him; if Azazel couldn't be convinced – if he decided to go after Emma – there would be nothing Mystique could do to stop him, and one way or another that would be that. "And if you give a shit about me or our baby you won't run off and get yourself killed over something this bloody stupid."

Mystique's hands clutched the coverlet so tightly that her knuckles turned a pale shade of sky blue, but she wasn't looking at her hands. She was watching Azazel, waiting to see what he would do. "Azazel – please – just leave it alone."

"I won't," he said stubbornly, though he took a step toward her. That was good – it put more distance between him and the blades. "Emma – she hurt you. She – Mystique, what did she _do_ to you?"

"Nothing," Mystique insisted. "She didn't do anything – it was all done to me a long time ago."

"I don't understand you," Azazel said, and Mystique wasn't sure if he meant that he didn't understand why she was shielding Emma or if he meant that he didn't understand what she was trying to say.

It didn't really matter, though, because he stepped away from the swords – at least for the time being – and sat down on the bed beside her.


	43. Chapter 43

" _It's easier to build strong children than repair broken men." - Frederick Douglass_

* * *

Christmas came and went, and it was left to Erik to tell Charles that Raven wouldn't be coming to visit after all. He told Charles that she was ill, and after all that wasn't a complete lie; she was sick on the past, cruel poison that it was, just like they all were. For once Charles didn't push the matter.

Erik, Fred and Toad went alone to tour the new school. Azazel dropped them off at the mansion, but no sooner had they arrived then he left again, returning to the Chicago headquarters. He was unwilling, Erik understood, to leave Emma and Raven alone in the same building.

Things at the school were chaotic, but all things considered Erik thought matters were going surprisingly well. When Charles had first began to talk about the idea of turning the mansion into a school, Erik had been completely incapable of picturing him looking after a gaggle of small children, yet he seemed to be adapting well to his new role.

In recent months, half a dozen young Mutants from a variety of backgrounds had come to live at the new "Xavier Institute for Gifted Youngsters" and to hear Charles tell it, their own "first class" of older recruits had gone above and beyond in stepping up to the task of acting as mentors and caretakers and instructors to the young students.

Erik had to take Charles word for it, so far as that went, as he hardly saw the others at all during the tour. They passed Sean in the halls, down on one knee in front of a small girl dressed bizarrely in a canary yellow rain sticker with a hem that almost brushed the ground and a pair of oversized yellow dish gloves, tying her shoe lace for her.

When Charles had rolled to a stop to introduce him to Fred and Toad, Sean had been almost excessively friendly, yet for Erik there had only been a "Hey," and a quick nod of the head, before turning back to the important business of tying shoes.

"Is she dressed like that 'cause of her ability or something?" Fred asked Charles, once he apparently believed that Sean and the girl were out of earshot; Fred had no sense of how far his voice carried, Erik had long ago discovered.

"No, no," Charles said, laughing and shaking his head. "It's simply that Jubilee has her own... unique sense of fashion.

If Sean had been unwilling to look at Erik, Alex had done nothing but glare. That disappointed Erik; he'd gotten well with the boy in the days before Cuba, and had honestly expected Alex to side with him on that beach. The boy was raw with misdirected anger; he belonged in the Brotherhood, not here with Charles, and of that much Erik was absolutely certain.

Hank didn't put in an appearance at all, but at least Darwin looked stronger than he had when Erik last saw him.

Erik hung back while Charles led the others on the tour, showing Fred and Toad the bedrooms, the classrooms, the pool and kitchen, the gym and training rooms and rec rooms and a dozen other amenities.

The Brotherhood needed to branch out, he decided, looking at all the resources Charles's students had at their fingertips. They needed to get more safe houses, and a second HQ; someplace more secluded than the Chicago headquarters, where the physically mutated brothers and sisters wouldn't have to worry about being spotted, where there would be more room for training, their own gun range maybe –

Charles had also introduced them to some of the new students. Alex's little brother, Scott Summers, was among them, peering at Erik's group through ruby quartz lenses. Erik pegged the boy for a little shit from the first, the polar opposite of Alex, stiff and stuck up and entirely too eager to please those in authority.

But the little Moroccan girl – Ororo – had a lovely Arabic. Erik wondered how Janos would feel about her, once she'd had a chance to master her ability, which by all reports far outstripped that of the wind bender.

The other children had been uncertain about Toad, who had himself been at least as wary, hanging back to crouch behind Fred's ankle. But Charles waved that way, saying that they would get along once they knew each other better. Erik was less sure.

Before the day was done, Fred had filled out the paperwork to enroll Toad in the coming semester – a rather dubious arrangement from a legal prospective, Erik noted, though he kept the thought to himself. He hadn't expected Fred to do anything differently – Erik knew he'd made his mind up about the matter before they'd even left Chicago. Fred wanted the kid somewhere safer than the Brotherhood's Headquarters, and Erik didn't think he was half wrong.

After Fred had witnessed the altercation between Raven and Emma, Erik had been concerned that the big Mutant would quit the Brotherhood, and take his people with him.

"The world's been ugly to me," Fred told him instead, with an anger that was both baffled and entirely earnest, once the others had departed. "But it's been a whole hell of a lot worse to the kid, and I'll be it's been bad on those girls to," he continued, meaning Raven and Emma. "I want to fight. If there's any chance of making things better for us and even if there ain't – even if all we're gonna be able to do is hit back – I want to fight.

"I just don't get why we always seem to end up fighting with each other."

 _Because we're broken,_ Erik might have told him, but that wouldn't have done any good; there was no benefit in stating the obvious.

Erik understood by then that it would be his lot to take the ruined ones; the older Mutants, who'd been too much alone for too long to ever really not be by themselves, even in the company of those they loves, and the ones who had been used worst by the world, who the world saw as especially ugly and loathsome, and the ones who'd been torn apart, who'd somehow knitted themselves back together by the force of vicious and stubborn will to live, but who's parts no longer fit together quite right.

Erik would have the crazy ones and the fearful ones and the ones covered all in scar – inside or out – and he'd have the ones who hated. The ones who hated were his, most of all.

And he didn't begrudge Charles his fresh-faced youngsters, who after all had their own scars, if not quite as indelible. It made sense that a man afflicted with such blind, hopeless optimism should take on the ones for whom there was still some small hope.

His own Mutants had a better idea of what the score was.

That was why Raven was his, after all, rather than Charles's.

New Years Eve was only a few days away when he decided that it was past time for Raven to take up her education again. She'd hardly left her room since the fight with Emma, and Azazel had been almost as scarce, hovering near her, as constant and fearsome as a guard dog.

When Erik knocked on the door to their adjacent suits, it was Azazel who let him in, and he wasted no time in making his case. "I want Emma gone," he said, as soon as the door had closed behind Erik. "I don't want her to be here with us anymore."

"Leave it alone," Raven told him. She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her hands puddled in what was left of her lap. "We've got to have a telepath, Azazel. We just have to. We'd be in danger without one."

"Emma is dangerous," Azazel answered.

"Maybe, but there are people who are a lot more dangerous than Emma out there," Raven said. This was the first time Erik was hearing this, but he had the sense that it had become an old argument between them.

"Erik, you see this is problem –" Azazel said, turning to him, as though with the expectation that Erik would intercede.

"It's a huge problem," Erik agreed. He remembered how, months ago, Emma had all but threatened to kill the lot of them. That had been back when they were still sleeping together. That had been been a hell of a mistake – probably the worst one he'd made since Cuba – but Emma had been the one to break it off. "But that doesn't make Raven any less correct. We'd be flying blind without her."

"Then have Charles find us new telepath," Azazel insisted.

" _No_ – Emma's staying," Raven cut in, before Erik could explain that it wasn't that simple. "We aren't turning any Mutants out. This was my fault, anyway. I shouldn't ever have hit her."

Azazel looked angry enough to kill someone at that – and Erik didn't have to guess who; he counted it as a small miracle that the teleporter hadn't gone after Emma yet, though Raven probably had quite a hand in that. Azazel seemed almost ready to say something – and Erik had an idea it wouldn't be pretty, whatever it was – but instead he disappeared with a swirl of red and black smoke.

"The first time I said that, he disappeared for fourteen hours," Raven told Erik, wearily. "He came back with chocolates and roses and vodka, but –"

"You shouldn't be drinking," Erik cut in.

"I know it, the vodka was for him. But I'm right. I shouldn't have hit her."

"No, you shouldn't have," Erik agreed. "Damn it, Raven – I thought she was going to kill you." He flexed his bandaged fingers, where he had cut himself gripping Emma's diamond encrusted arm. "What the hell got into you?"

"I dunno," she said, looking down at her hand. "Just got mad, I guess."

"You think I wasn't?" He didn't give her a chance to answer. "Look – do you want something to do?"

"God yes," Raven told him. She got to her quickly, one hand braced over her belly as she stood.

Raven followed him down to the basement, yet when she saw the tools and bits of hardware spread out on a worktable, the fuses and the timers and the spools of wire, she became rather less enthusiastic.

"You're still trying to make a killer out of me," she said, flatly, and Erik didn't correct her. He could see dejection in her yellow eyes, as well as anger. "You're too late for that, though, you know."

That was puzzling, but for the moment Erik ignored it. "I think you'll be good at this," he told her, honestly. "You have steady, delicate hands – at least when you chose to have them – and you're more patient than anyone else here."

"Azazel knows how to make bombs," she said. "But he doesn't like them."

"Azazel know how to wire together a few sticks of dynamite and a fuse," Erik told her, dismissively. "I can show you tricks that are far more intricate."

Raven went to work with him sullenly. She was quiet, at least at first, so Erik talked instead, filling the time between his instructions and explanations on how to build different types of bombs with a one-sided conversation.

He had promised her that he would explain about his names, and so he did, telling her that he had been born Max Eisenhardt, but that his mother – he was never entirely sure how – had eventually managed to obtain false papers for him. That hadn't made a difference – the trains had rolled before he could be smuggled out of the ghetto – but he'd arrived at Auschwitz with papers that named him as one Erik Lehnsherr and an ethnic German, though no one looked at them until he'd been taken up to Shaw's office. They wouldn't have fooled the guards, in any case, had it come to that.

"Shaw must have understood that my papers were false," Erik told her, his fingers going to his shirt, to the place where for so long he had wore the star of David. "He knew I was a Jew, after all. But he never bothered to ask after my real name –

"No, look – you have to strip the wire back a bit further to have enough length to work with. Do you see?"

He continued with the story, passing over his teenage years, Magda and Anya and everything that had followed. "When I went looking for Shaw, I took up the name Lehnsherr again. I seemed less likely to attract negative attention to my uncle that way. And I thought that if Shaw caught wind of the fact that Erik Lehnsherr was hunting for him, he might come to me on his own.

"He always thought I'd come back to him, you know – that I'd join him. Emma had been inside my head, and she knew better, of course. But Shaw wouldn't listen to her – he was absolutely certain that I would come over. That's why Emma let the CIA keep her – or that's the reason she gave me, at any rate. I know that she lies. But she could have walked out of that prison any time she wanted, or whistled for Azazel to come get her, but she didn't, so.

"I suspect that she wanted to make him pay for not taking her seriously, but she never really thought that I'd actually manage to kill the bastard. Do you remember how surprised she looked when I came into that cell – how _scared_? She was expecting Shaw. I don't doubt that at all.

"We all would have died in Cuba if Emma had been there, and the world with us, you know. I don't doubt that, either. Well, Shaw might have taken the ones who were willing to come over to him, but... Well, lucky for us she wasn't there."

Erik paused. "He called me 'son' just before I killed him, you know. Have you ever heard of anything so repulsive?"

Mystique shook her head, focused doggedly on wiring a timer to the device. "I cried, while I was in the sub with him. I thought I was going to die, but that wasn't what made me cry; I was so afraid that I wasn't going to be able to make him see that he was wrong, to prove to him that I wasn't _his_. It was always so difficult to tell Shaw that he was wrong – Emma knows a bit about that, too, I suppose, I can see why she lost patience with him. He pinned me against the wall and wrung confessions from me that I couldn't even explain to you in retrospect – Why did I let him make me say those things? I never believed them, but he seemed so _certain_ that he knew exactly what I was – and I cried.

"I never used to be a crier. Sometimes I went _years_ without crying, believe it or not, but I've been crying so frequently as of late. I'm almost embarrassed with myself, but really it's your brother's fault. He did something to me – pried all my powerful emotions and memories, bad and good, up to the surface – and I haven't been the same since."

Raven sat the completed bomb aside. It was a simple thing, and it lacked a charge of course, but Erik thought it was solid work for a first try. "It was different with me," she told him softly. "He left the bad things alone for me, and they all faded away until I was able to pretend, at least, that things had always been normal and good.

"Emma gave it all back to me – everything that happened to me before I met Charles. I never wanted it, but she gave it back."

Erik nodded. "She played that trick on me as well, using my memories as a weapon against me, but at least in my case she didn't remind me of anything I didn't already know. I'm sorry that happened to you."

Raven answered as though he hadn't spoken. "Charles used to have these really bad nightmares, you know? I'd sneak into his room to sleep in his bed when we were little, and sometimes he'd wake up shaking and crying, and I'd do everything I could think of to make him feel better, but there were a couple times when I think I yelled at him – I was always so scared of being found out while I was at school, and it was harder to keep up my appearance when I was sleepy, so sometimes when he woke me up I would get mad, because I didn't even know where the nightmares were _coming from_ , you know? I mean, what did _he_ have to be afraid of? Guess I know now...

"My parents tried to kill me," she told Erik. "I can remember that now. I can remember everything. I remember laying in my bed, listening to them talking about it, and I remember them coming to get me. I remember the water –" She paused, biting her lip, and Erik thought, _She's half a child still. She's ancient and she's a child, all at once._

"They tried to kill me," Raven said again. "And I think I killed my father – I pushed him away, and he hit his head on something, and there was so much blood, and he wasn't moving, and I – I think I did kill him."

"Good," Erik said flatly.

Mystique pushed herself away from the worktable, and then she was crying, her arms wrapped miserably around her belly. "How am I going to – how can I be a mother when –" she started, but she didn't seemed to know how – or to dare – to finish. "What if – what if I'm the same –"

Erik got to his feet so quickly that the stool he'd been sitting on would have toppled over, if he hasn't caught the metal in it with his ability to steady it.

He put his arms around her shoulders, covering her hands, which were still curled around her belly, with his own. "You don't have anything in common with them," Erik spoke into her ear, rocking her against him. He could feel the coarseness of her hair against his cheek, the roughness of the scales on her hands and belly. "They aren't your family – they never were. We are, and Charles.

"Everything's going to be okay."

"You know that's a lie," Raven said, sniffling.

 _Alles ist gut_ , he heard, like an echo. He heard Kurt, too, telling him that they were in bad trouble, that there was absolutely nothing that couldn't be done to a Mutant.

But sometimes it was important to lie to the people you loved. Sometimes that was the only thing you could do for them.

So he said again, "Everything's going to be okay."


	44. Chapter 44

" _Latent in every man is a venom of amazing bitterness, a black resentment; something that curses and loathes life, a feeling of being trapped, of having trusted and been fooled, of being the helpless prey of impotent rage, blind surrender, the victim of a savage, ruthless power that gives and takes away, enlists a man, and crowning injury inflicts upon him the humiliation of feeling sorry for himself." - Paul Valery_  


* * *

As of the morning that she knocked on Mystique's bedroom door, Emma had been almost completely withdrawn from the rest of the Brotherhood for nearly three weeks. She had not been at meals, nor meetings, nor had she joined the others in the common room during evenings to watch TV.

Mystique had actually only seen her once since the visit with Erik's uncle, more than a week ago, when she and Azazel had happened to run into Emma in the stair well. Azazel had gone stiff beside her at the sight of Emma, staring at the woman with a steady and unblinking glare, and Mystique did not need to be a telepath to know that his mind was full of darkest murder.

Mystique had taken responsibility for the altercation between herself and Emma, if only to prevent an outbreak of further violence within their ranks. She knew that she should not have struck Emma, and she felt badly for being at the center of the ugliness that had grown up between Azazel and Emma – they had a history together, if nothing else, and it was sad to see the ruination of that – but she understood also that Emma's reaction had its roots in things which had nothing whatsoever to do with that slap across the face.

There was something fundamentally and deeply wrong with Emma, and Mystique neither could nor would take responsibility for that fact.

In the long months since Cuba, they had all learned to contend with Emma's constant dissatisfaction, with her slights and insults and threats. She had – by all appearances, intentionally – alienated everyone around her.

So Mystique didn't understand why Emma was standing at her door now, but she was instantly suspicious. Azazel was away, on some scouting mission with Erik, looking at sites for safe houses; at first, Mystique thought that was lucky, but then it came to her that Emma had without a doubt planned things that way.

"Do you want to see your baby?" Emma asked her, as soon as Mystique opened the door.

Mystique blinked at her. "Is that some type of threat?" she asked, flatly.

Emma laughed at that, a high little titter that seemed bizarrely cheerful yet somehow brittle. It threw Mystique, though later she would understand that all of this was only a cover for a soul-deep fear.

"I'm serious," Emma said, and asked again, "Do you want to see it?"

There was nothing in the world that Mystique wanted more than to see the baby – to know what she needed to expect, one way or another. And of course, she knew, Emma would know how badly she wanted it.

"What do you mean?" she asked slowly.

When Emma explained what an ultrasound machine could do, Mystique frown uncertainly. "I didn't know that they could do that..."

"It's a new technology," Emma told her. "It isn't available to the general public yet."

"Is it like an x-ray or something, though?" Mystique asked. "I don't think those are supposed to be safe for the baby, when you're pregnant..."

"It's not radiation." Emma's smile was thin. "It works with sound waves – like sonar. It's safe," she promised.

It was too great a temptation, so against her better judgment, Mystique got into the car with Emma. The ride to the hospital was mostly silent; Emma seemed distracted, but for once she was polite enough.

There was only one tense moment, when Mystique came to a halt while they were crossing the lot. "Wait..." she said. "Do we have an appointment?"

A cloud had passed over Emma's face, black irritation, but she turned it into a plastic smile almost as quickly as it appeared. "Do you think I need an appointment to get what I want?" she asked, with another little laugh.

Mystique guessed she didn't, so they went inside.

Emma had told her that she didn't need to worry about keeping up a human appearance once they were in the ultrasound room, that she would have the doctor under control, so he wouldn't register alarm at anything about her appearance nor the fetus's. So Mystique put on her own skin and laid back on the table, trying not to feel too nervous, and let the doctor do his work.

Afterward, she and Emma went into the doctor's office, where he showed her a series of prints. The images were blurry and dark, yet Mystique couldn't tear her eyes from them. _That's my baby_ , she thought, with wonder, while the doctor mapped out its features, counting out fingers and toes.

"One, two, three," he said, tracing a foot for Mystique with his fingertip, a fuzzy look in his eyes. "And here's the tail," the doctor continued, pointing. "That looks about how you would expect at this stage of development."

The doctor sat back in his chair and folded his hands. His eyes looked more focused now, perhaps because Emma's influence on him was not as extreme, since he was no longer expected to remain blasé at the sight of a tail. She felt slightly guilty about the way they were manipulating him, but mostly she felt relieved; clearly, Emma was capable of influencing a professional's mind without effecting his competency.

That was good to know; Mystique was banking on it, when it came time to have the baby.

"The fetus is a deal smaller than one would expect, on average,"the doctor told her evenly. Mystique wondered if that would have provoked more alarm if not for Emma's influence, if she should be worried. "But everything else appears to be in good order," he continued, pushing his spectacles up on his nose.

"Oh, and you're expecting a little boy," he added, smiling at her.

When they were back in the hallway, Mystique turned to Emma. "Thank you for doing this. I – I'm really grateful," she told her, meaning every word.

The prints of the ultrasound were in her bag, along with the negatives and the doctor's written report; it wouldn't have done to leave a paper trail. She could hardly wait to be able to look at them again, to show them to Azazel, to try to puzzle out the shape of their son from the grainy black and white images, so hard to read, full of so many promises –

"Look," Emma said, and Mystique had the sense that she was about to ask her something – maybe something important.

But all she said was, "Go get something to eat in the cafeteria or something. I'll meet you there in a little bit."

"Okay..." Mystique watched her walk off, puzzled but distracted by thoughts about the pictures and the baby, before turning the other way to head for the cafeteria. She got some food, and sat down at a table to wait for Emma.

Almost four hours passed before Emma showed up, and when she finally reappeared her face was as pale as cottage cheese.

Mystique had by then been fuming – she had been ready to shout, to curse Emma for whatever game she was playing – but when she saw Emma's expression terror flooded her. "What's the matter?" she demanded, but Emma wouldn't answer.

"Car," she told Mystique. "Now."

So they went.


	45. Chapter 45

" _Progress and reaction have both turned out to be swindles. Seemingly, there is nothing left but quietism – robbing reality of its terrors by simply submitting to it." – George Orwell_  


* * *

**  
**   


"What's going on?" Mystique demanded, not for the first time, as Emma pulled the car out of the dimness of the parking garage and into the bright winter afternoon.

She had been seething when Emma had finally deigned to turn up in the cafeteria, and she was still angry now, though she was no longer so certain of the righteousness of that anger. A confused sort of dread had begun to creep up on her instead.

Emma didn't answer her question, no more than she had any of the other times Mystique had demanded an explanation during the walk back to the car. She looked straight ahead at the road, her hands gripping the steering wheel white knuckled. Emma's eyes were puffy, Mystique noticed suddenly. _Has she been crying?_ she wondered, astounded.

The idea frightened Mystique more than she wanted to admit.

Emma didn't cry. Emma was poise and power and ice hard perfection in a size four. She could snipe unrelentingly at a person's every little fault and she could be manipulative and she could use your worst nightmares as a weapon against you and she could kill without so much as blinking, but one thing that Emma did not do was cry.

Or at least, before now Mystique had not been able to imagine her crying.

After a very long time, Mystique asked, "What's the matter?" her voice softer now, the outrage having fled from it.

"The matter?" Emma repeated, broken glass in her small laugh. "That's a very broad question, you know," she continued, but she seemed to give it serious consideration. "Why, everyone is a liar," she said finally. "That's what's the matter."

"That isn't true," Mystique said.

"Liar," Emma answered, but with none of the fiery indignation that usually came with her accusations. Instead, she sound simply exhausted, as though even speaking was almost too much work. "You're even more of a liar than most. Everything about you is a lie."

Mystique didn't answer that.

The silence dragged on, and when Emma finally continued, what she had to say seemed to have little connection to anything that had come before. "You know we've wasted the last year, don't you? Erik's lying to himself about it, but we have."

"That's not true," Mystique said. A thousand things had changed since Cuba; Mystique herself had changed, in ways that she would never have thought possible before, and if so many of those changes felt like just another front – a disguise on top of a disguise on top of a disguise – then the fact still remained that she was learning to wear her own skin well, and it chafed much less than the skins she'd hidden behind in the past.

She'd learned how to wield a blade and fire a gun and how to wire bombs, and if the part of her who still had anything in common with the dead girl who'd been called Raven still shrank from the idea of putting these new skills to use in earnest, the knowledge of her past that Emma had inflicted upon her had done much to quiet the small and tremulous voice of that particular ghost.

Even her new understanding of what her parents had tried to do to her – and what she'd done to them instead – felt like a point to her credit, once she'd come to grips with the shock of the memory; if that nearly forgotten little girl could fight for her life and win, surely she could do the same, especially when she had all the power of the Brotherhood behind her.

Mystique still felt frightened much of the time. The child scared her, as did his prospects, and the thought that they might not be able to keep him safe. Sometimes her own comrades frightened her; Janos's crippled pride and the extremes it drove him to, Fred's ugly temper and the strange way Toad held them all at a distance, Emma's detached hatreds and bitter, brittle discontents, the easy regard with which Azazel could approach actions of the greatest brutality, Erik's brooding silences and cold places.

And sometimes, when she felt the distance between herself and the others growing smaller, when she recognized that she had more in common with these here than she ever had with Charles, she frightened herself.

But it was not the type of fear that held her back, or that dictated her actions. The fear she knew most often now was the same sort of fear that had driven her to first approach Azazel, simply to prove to herself that she was capable of speaking with the devilish man who had scared her so badly. It was the type of fear that demanded that she dare herself to go further, to be more rather than less, and that made an almost indescribable difference.

So it seemed to her that the last year had been more than worth it, yet none of that felt concrete enough to satisfy Emma. So instead of speaking of her growing sense of becoming who she needed and wanted to be and the feeling of security that came from that, or the way they child growing inside her felt like the promise of a future she had never really believed in, but somehow she didn't think any of that would satisfy Emma.

So instead she said, "We're a lot stronger than we were. We're better trained and there's more of us than there was a year ago, and soon we'll be even more. And Azazel and Erik are looking on finding us a second base of operations, more safe houses –"

"Waste of time," Emma repeated. "Erik's temporizing. He's mistaken movement for action, though he really should know better, and the rest of you are just going along with it. And it's a mistake. In the type of war we ought to be fighting, greater numbers are more of a liability than a strength. Erik had everything he needed the moment I left my cell to join him, if only he had it in him to seize power."

"What do you mean?" Mystique asked warily.

"Between the three of us, Erik, Azazel and I could have the government of every major nation on its knees within a week, if he was really serious about any of this." Emma took one hand from the wheel, fluttering it dismissively. "It could even be fairly bloodless, if Erik insisted.

"It would be as simple as having Azazel teleport us to the humans' weapons sites – he'd be more than capable of locating them all. I could use my own ability to put the personnel to sleep, or else to make us invisible to them, while Erik crushed their tanks and aircraft and threw their missiles into the sea. We could take out the weapons factories next, so they couldn't produce more. And we'd keep a few dozen nuclear weapons for ourselves, to encourage good behavior on the part of the sapiens.

"Once the humans were disarmed, it would only be a matter of time until we had complete control of the planet. We could announce ourselves then – television, radio, the papers. Mutants from all over the world would rally to us – no more of this recruiting bad luck cases one or two at a time."

Emma paused, biting her lip. "It would work," she said, sudden urgency in her voice. "And it could all be taken care of very quickly – a couple of months, maybe. If we started tomorrow, this world could be ours before your baby was born."

Mystique frown, thinking hard. It was not, she thought, actually a bad plan. There were a thousand ways it could go wrong, sure, but that was true of any plan, and if it worked... how much better everything would be. There'd be no more hiding. She wouldn't have to worry about her child getting hurt – no one would need to get hurt, not even the humans.

For a minute, she found herself caught up in Emma's vision, filled with a sense of excitement, a certainty that they could make this work... but then another thought came to her and those feelings deflated.

It was Emma who put voice to her dashed hopes. "You're thinking that your brother wouldn't like any of this. That he'd get in our way, send his little X-Men to stop us. Well, yes. Of course he would.

"But that's a threat that could easily be neutralized, if Erik was willing to pay the price. All he'd have to do was give Azazel the helmet, and send him off to do what he's so good at doing."

"They wouldn't do that," Mystique said at once, without hesitation. "Neither of them. Azazel wouldn't hurt Charles – not my brother – and Erik would never ask him to."

Emma glanced away from the road to look at her with hooded eyes. "Have you considered the possibility that you're wrong about that?" she asked. "Maybe you don't understand either of them as well as you think you do."

"Or maybe you're a liar, and you're just trying to start something," Mystique answered flatly.

Emma didn't bother to deny it. The traffic light ahead of them was red, and Emma brought the car to a jarring stop. "Everyone lies," Emma said, turning to look at her. "Everyone. They lie to others and even more, they lie to themselves. So I've always thought, Why shouldn't I do the same?"

"Green light," Mystique interrupted, her voice flat.

Emma turned her eyes back to the road and passed through the intersection, and when she continued on something about the tone of the conversation had changed. "Doctors are some of the worst liars," she said, her glassy eyes fixed on the road. The traffic was very bad. "They all lie to you, and then they have the audacity to claim that you're the one who isn't telling the truth.

"They spent years telling my parents that I was lying, or crazy, or both, when I told them that I could hear voices when no one was speaking out loud, and for too long I made the mistake of believing them – or, at least, of _trying_ to believe them. Of wanting to believe them, see? Doctors can't be content if you don't believe their lies, too, and what child doesn't want to please adults who hold power over her?

"You can tell a doctor the names of his children and his mistresses and his childhood pets, and he will sit there and insist that you are lying, even when he _knows_ absolutely that you are not.

"The doctor back there lied to me," she continued, and for a confused moment Mystique thought she must be speaking of the doctor with the ultrasound, but that man hadn't even been aware that Emma was in the room with them, let alone spoken to her.

"He looked straight at me and lied," Emma went on. "He lied and lied, droning on about options, about course of treatment, how how I still had a fighting chance, and all the while he was thinking to himself, ' _No hope. Six months or less._ '"

"I don't understand what you're trying to tell me," Mystique said, and felt shamed by the panic that she heard in her own voice.

"Liar," Emma told her again.

When Emma spoke again, it was to revert suddenly to their former topic of conversation. "Erik isn't cut out for what he's trying to do here – for what he knows he needs to do." Emma glanced at her again, and there was a kind of pleading in her eyes, a desperation that Mystique should understand the importance of what she was saying, though her voice was coolly detached, almost analytical. "He talks a hard line, but when it comes down to it's mostly talk. It's bravado born of fear, nothing more."

Mystique frowned in disagreement. When provoked, Erik was one of the hardest and most merciless men she had ever met; it was something that she admired in him, though it also scared her.

Emma read her thoughts. "Sure," she said, "he's happy enough to kill anyone who threatens him or his directly, or who gets in his way, but he's not nearly bad enough to do what needs to be done; he's too worried about provoking backlash, too decent to make the first move, too frightened that he might become ' _like them_.' You though –"

"Stop it," Mystique said, but Emma didn't.

"You're a different story, though, aren't you? You have it in you to be absolutely anything. To do absolutely whatever you need to do in order to survive."

"You're lying again."

"We both know that I'm not," Emma told her. "Erik's only going to hold us back. You should be in charge. You should take the others and leave. They'll follow you if you ask them to, they like you in a way that they'll never like Erik."

Mystique paused, wondering if there was any truth to that. Erik could be extremely charismatic, but he was self-contained, too; a leader, not a friend. Azazel was nonetheless friendly with Erik, but if she did leave there would be no contest. Fred would come, too – Erik had not made himself all that accessible to the new crop of recruits, but she and Fred had spent time together, and she knew he liked him – and Fred's people, Toad and Luke and Matthew, would almost certainly go wherever Fred went. Janos would go wherever Angel went, and Angel had been restless for a long time now.

Mystique shook her head. It didn't make any difference, one way or another; she was for Erik. "That's not going to happen," she told Emma.

"I know it," Emma said, flatly, no feeling whatsoever in her voice. Mystique wondered if it was harder or easier for a telepath to conceal emotion, to put on a mask of indifference, because she was quite certain that Emma was wearing one of her masks now. Charles had always worn his heart on his sleeve.

"You're going to keep on following at Erik's heel, because you're too scared of what will happen if you finally stand up on your own. And Erik's going to keep making little retaliatory feints, but he'll never twist the knife, never take it as fair as it needs to go. And all of you will keep wasting time, saving every bad luck Mutant you find and keeping friendly with your brother, while he works to keep Erik even more ineffectual than he'd be on his own.

"And meanwhile, the humans are getting ready. Don't ever think that they aren't. They're getting ready, and when they fall on you it won't be like what happened in Cuba – they won't make the same mistakes twice. When they finally come, it will be with new weapons, and by then it will be too late to wish that you'd gotten to them first."

They were home now, in the parking lot across the street from the headquarters, and Emma put the car into park. Then she just sat, looking out the front windows, her hands clutching the steering wheel in a death grip. "But if I'm very lucky, I'll be dead before any of that happens."

"Emma..." Mystique said, at a loss as to what else to say.

"It was the radiation, of course," she went on, as though Mystique hadn't spoken. The word came into her mind, never spoken out loud but projected, _cancer_ , and Mystique felt a shutter of horror cut through her. It was 1963 and that was a word that was still almost universally synonymous with _death_.

"Sebastian said it wouldn't hurt us, but he lied. He lied about so many things... but I never..." She was blinking quickly now, and Mystique fought the urge to flee the car. "How did he trick me?"

"He was so old," Mystique said, feeling the inadequacy of her answer, the lameness of it, yet needing to say something. "Maybe he'd had more time learn how to lie convincingly –"

But then, Janos had seen through Shaw, and they both knew it. Janos had told her that Shaw was only out for Shaw, that Shaw's war would kill the Mutants along with the humans, all while making Shaw unbelievably powerful, and Janos had known nothing that Emma had not. Even Azazel, as oblivious as he was to such things, had felt a vague sense that there was something off about Shaw and his plan, though in the end he had allowed Emma to vouch for him.

So how had Emma been fooled? How had a telepath fallen under Shaw's spell? Mystique didn't know. She was not think that it would be possible for her to understand it, given how mystified Emma herself was by the question, and was not sure that she even wanted to try.

Not for the first time, she found herself wondering if Emma had loved Shaw.

"My entire life has been a swindle," Emma said, without emotion, and then Mystique did something that she had never planned to do.

She leaned across the seats and she kissed Emma, not a small peck on the cheek but full on the lips, long and forcefully, one hand coming up to press against the base of Emma's neck, fingers tangling in her blond hair. It came to her with a sudden certainty, as though the thought had leaked inadvertently from Emma's mind and into her own, that Emma was not a natural blond, that her hair was actually a mousey brown, but that she had taken to dyeing it to please Shaw.

When she finally drew away, Mystique saw that Emma's face was flushed. She watched Emma raise one dainty hand, each nail faultlessly manicured, to brush her fingertips against her own lips lightly, moving with a sort of astonished bemusement. Her eyes were very wide.

 _Let it make it better,_ Mystique thought to herself, as close to prayer as she had ever come since the days of her abortive childhood, when she'd huddled under her bed, hoping her parents wouldn't come for her and begging to be made normal. _Just let it make it hurt a little less._

Emma's lips parted slowly, as though she were feeling out the words before she spoke them. "I won't tell if you don't," she said softly.

"Okay," Mystique agreed with a sharp nod, her relief palpable. She swiped at her mouth with the back her hand, then checked in the review mirror to make certain that she was wearing none of Emma's lipstick, before climbing from the car and following Emma inside.


	46. Chapter 46

" _We are linked to others by the roles we play, by the help we receive, by the wider network of others made available to us, by the selves others create and sustain, by the comforting myths they allow us, by the reality they validate for us, and by the futures they make possible." - Lyn H. Lofland_  


* * *

Azazel was enamored with the ultrasound pictures.

Mystique still could barely make heads or tails – pun intended – of the grainy images, but studying them under the narrow beam of light given off by the bedside lamp, Azazel seemed to understand exactly what he was looking at.

They were in bed together, her head resting against his chest while he pointed out the details, his roughened fingertips mapping out the shape of their future; the spade at the end of the tail, the curl of long and bird-like toes. She wondered how much of it he was really reading in the prints and how much of it was only his imagination, finding patterns in the static to invent a picture of their as yet unseen child.

For Azazel, the presence of a tail had been the best possible news. He had gone most of his life believing that he was the only one like himself, she knew, and he wanted very badly to see himself reflected in the child.

The sense of relief that came with the pictures – the assurance that there was no question but that their baby would be a Mutant – went unremarked upon. She could not have said what Azazel was thinking about the matter, but as for herself she found it too heavy for discussion, that sense of relief which felt so very much like shame.

Azazel didn't ask where the ultrasound pictures had come from or how she had gotten them – he accepted them unquestioningly, as he did most things. She thought about bringing the topic up now, of mentioning the fact that it had all been Emma's idea, that it had been Emma who took her to get the pictures which he had found to be so wonderful, but she didn't think it would make any difference.

Azazel's anger toward Emma had in no way abated since the night she had forcefully wrenched free Mystique's suppressed memories. She did not imagine herself to be for blame for the gulf that now separated Emma and Azazel – there was a lot that was wrong with Emma, but those things had been wrong for a long time, and Mystique understood that they had absolutely nothing to do with herself. But Azazel and Emma had been important to each other once – had been very nearly family – and all of that seemed irreparably ruined now.

It all made Mystique very sad. Worse, it made her think about Charles more than she wanted to.

Azazel had seemed to have given up the idea of convincing Erik to expel Emma from the Brotherhood ( _Or of killing her himself. He would have tried if you hadn't stopped him_ , she reminded herself) but he'd refused even be in the same room with Emma ever since. More than that – he wouldn't even talk about her.

Sometimes she wanted to scream at him, to tell him that he was being stupid – that he was wasting time that Emma didn't have, and if he wasn't careful he'd regret it later. But that would have meant revealing Emma's secret, and she wouldn't do that.

It was not, really, that she felt especially compromised over the kiss, though she recognized that Emma was more than capable of finding some way of using it against her. She supposed Azazel would be hurt and very possibly angry if he found out about it, but she thought that he would get over it.

But there was nothing, Mystique understood, that Emma hated more than being pitied – than being seen as weak, or even worse, stupid. And when this all came out – and it was inevitable that it would, eventually, even if Mystique wouldn't be the one to let it slip – it just just as inevitable that the others would reach just those conclusions; that Emma had been stupid and weak to trust Shaw, when she – a telepath of all things! – really ought to have known better, and now she was paying the price for that, and wasn't it all just so sad?

No, Mystique wouldn't be the one to unleash that flood of pity on her, tainted as it would be with so many (silent and maybe even unconscious, but there for Emma to read just as plain as print) I-told-you-so's.

It seemed to Mystique that Emma was having enough difficulty keeping her head above water just dealing with her own raw and wounded feelings. She thought that if the others were brought into it now Emma might just drown, and there was a possibility that she would drag others down with her.

So Mystique kept her mouth shut, fully expecting that things would come out on their own – whether by Emma's choice or not – when they came out. But almost three months passed before people finally started asking questions, and when the questions finally did start they didn't come from the quarter Mystique had expected.

Mystique was headed for the kitchen, hoping for a late night snack, but she stopped in the threshold when she heard voices coming from in there. By then she was close to her due date – very close, less than two weeks away, if everything could be expected to run on schedule – and she had not been sleeping well.

She'd been feeling restless, actually, for some number of days, had been lonely in her own room and claustrophobic in the managed chaos of Azazel's. When she was inside the Headquarters she felt trapped, but when she went outside she felt too vulnerable, surrounded on all sides by hostile forces. She hadn't been able to sleep – it was impossible to find a comfortable position with her belly in the way – and yet she felt constantly only half awake.

It was Fred and the twins, and the three of them were arguing about something, but as usual other people didn't get much of a say in before Fred bowled over them. "Lost so much weight..." she heard one of the twins say – she wasn't sure which one, their back was to her – but then Fred cut him off.

"She hasn't even," Fred said. "You're wrong, or else you're just making stuff up. Yeah, she's little, but she isn't any skinnier then she's always been, and anyway it ain't any of your business how much she weighs or doesn't weigh."

 _They're talking about Emma,_ Mystique realized suddenly. She remained where she was, hidden behind the door frame.

"But it isn't just that she's lost weight – which she has," one of the twins went on – it was Luke, Mystique decided after a minute. He had a kinder voice than Matthew, who tended toward smugness. "She looks _sick_. She's putting up a projection, or something, so you guys can't see it, but that telepathy stuff doesn't work on us."

"Sure," Fred said dismissively.

"It doesn't," Luke insisted. "It's because our brains are wired together weird or something. But look – when was the last time you saw her eat anything?"

That caught Fred's attention. He lifted his head sharply, eyes looking off into the distance while he thought hard about that. One hand came up to knead the roll of muscle at the back of his neck while he thought about it.

"You ought to know the answer to that," Matthew pushed. "You're down here in the kitchen all the time."

"Hell," Fred said, turning red. The hand at his neck came down to make a fist. "You guys are full of shit."

He stomped out of the kitchen, and Mystique ducked quickly around the door frame, pressing up against the wall and morphing her skin to match the wallpaper. Fred went by without so much as glancing toward her.

"Why are you such a dick?" Luke demanded of his brother angrily. Matthew didn't answer.

Mystique peeled herself away from the wall and stepped into the kitchen. The twins startled at her sudden appearance. "Leave it alone," she said, and was surprised to her the authority in her own voice.

"Yeah, but –" Matthew started, but he didn't seem to know how to finish.

"Our little sister died," Luke said flatly. His eyes were watching Mystique intently. "Leukemia. Emma Frost isn't just sick, is she? She's dying."

Mystique didn't answer. She stared back at the two of them, knowing from experience that most people – even other Mutants – couldn't hold her gaze for long. There was something too direct about the yellowness of her eyes, something that others found disconcerting.

Matthew broke first, and when he turned his head to the side to look away he dragged Luke's along with him.

"The situations being managed," she told them. Her voice was cold, her body stiff, everything about her saying, _Back off_.

"Does the boss know?" Matthew asked, his voice squeaky.

 _The boss?_ Mystique repeated to herself, astonished. _Can he possibly mean Erik?_ It might have been funny under other circumstances.

"Of course," she said. The lie came easily, and she saw at once that they believed it. "Leave it alone," she told them again, still pinning them under her gaze, and after a moment they nodded in tandem.

Mystique turned and left, and when she came to Emma's room the door opened before she could knock. Standing in the doorway impatiently, Emma looked no different from the way she had always looked, but her eyes were hollow.

Mystique did not ask to see her the way she really was now, below whatever psychic front she was putting up. She did not feel as though she really needed to see.

"You'll get what you need from me," Emma told her, before Mystique could articulate the question.

"I can get Charles," she told Emma, uneasily. She looked fine, yes, but god her voice was so weary. "He'll help. I know he will."

"Stop worrying about it," Emma told her. "Get some sleep," and Mystique felt the telepathic _push_ that came with the words, more a command than a suggestion.

So she did.

She turned and went back to Azazel's room and crawled under the silken covers with him, and he rolled over without waking and draped an arm over her, his long fingers spread over the swell of her belly while his tail twined itself around her leg loosely, and she did sleep, deeply and unbrokenly for the first time in weeks. She slept well through the morning and into the early afternoon, long after Azazel had gotten up and gotten on with the business of the new day.

It was the pain that finally woke her.


	47. Chapter 47

" _The roles that we construct are constructed because we feel that they will help us to survive and also, of course, because they fulfill something in our personalities; and one does not, therefore, cease playing a role simply because one has begun to understand it. All roles are dangerous. The world tends to trap you in the role you play and it is always extremely hard to maintain a watchful, mocking distance between oneself as one appears to be and oneself as one actually is." - James Baldwin_  


" _Some people will never understand the kind of super power it takes for some people to just walk outside." - Andrea Gibson_  


* * *

Up until a certain point, Emma pulled everything off beautifully.

Mystique had felt no panic when the contractions began. Nor did she feel any particular need to rush; getting to the hospital in a timely fashion would be easy, after all – the tricky parts came after they got there.

Mystique picked up the bedside phone and dialed Emma's room, and after that was taken care of she called Erik. There wasn't much need for discussion, in either case; all of this had been planned with military precision months in advance, after all.

She was not certain where Azazel was – if he was somewhere in the headquarters or elsewhere – but he was never away for long these, and Mystique knew he'd be back soon.

So she sat down on the edge of the bed to wait. Erik arrived a few minutes later, and when she opened the door for him he looked calm and collected, though a bit breathless – Mystique had a strong suspicion that he had taken a number of the stairs at a run, and she smiled softly at that but kept the thought to herself.

Emma joined them a short time later. She might have called for Azazel then, using that odd high whistle that somehow projected itself across space to draw him back from wherever he had gone, but he returned on his own first, appearing in the room with a crackle like a muffled rifle shot. Mystique supposed that he had sensed that Erik was in the bedroom with her (he could not track Emma with his ability) and had made the necessary connections.

When all of this was initially being planned out, Azazel hadn't liked the idea of including Emma in the affair. He had suggested alternatives to going to the hospital (an idea which in of itself, independent of his desire to cut Emma out of the proceedings, seemed to frighten him), and when that tact hadn't worked, Azazel had argued that they enlist the help of Charles instead.

Mystique had not been able to rally a rational argument against that, but Erik had saved her from having to try. Charles was still too ill to manage something of this scale, he had told Azazel evenly. Mystique was almost positive that was a lie – she hoped to god that it was a lie – but she had gone with it, at the same time remaining quiet as to her knowledge of Emma's own illness.

Eventually, Azazel had resigned himself unhappily to the idea that Emma would need to be included. On the other hand, when he realized that Erik intended to come along, too – something which Mystique had taken so entirely for granted that she hadn't even thought that it merited mention – Azazel's response had been... harder to read. The look that had flashed across his face was not exactly jealousy – it had more in common with insecurity, perhaps, or discomfort – but Mystique thought that there might be potential for it to become jealousy if all three of them were not very careful. Nonetheless, Azazel had accepted the idea then and did not make an issue of Erik's presence now.

Now he gave Erik one stiff, serious nod, which Erik returned. Emma he did not acknowledge.

Then he turned to Mystique. "Is early," he said, frowning fretfully, and the uncertain note in his voice was almost argumentative, as though he thought Mystique might reconsider her poor timing if he pointed out the error.

"No alarmingly so," Erik chimed in lightly. "And in any case, who's to even say that Mutant infants keep to the standard schedule?" But Mystique thought he looked nervous, too, and not only because the baby had decided to come a week ahead of time.

So they joined hands, and Azazel teleported them to a dark corner of the hospital's parking garage, and from there Emma took care of things with a flourish. She led the others out into the open, and all of the humans – nurses, patients and guests, and finally the receptionist at the front desk – fell under her control as they went.

The receptionist tried to push a clipboard across the desk at them, but Emma smiled brilliantly and said, "We won't be filling out any paperwork today, though I'd like it very much if you'd behave as though you believe that we did. Now, we'll need a single room, thank you, and please don't be slow about," and the receptionist smiled and nodded at her and turned to do as she was told.

A nurse pushing an empty wheelchair approached them, but Azazel stepped in her path and moved forward to bully it away from her. The woman gave ground easily, though Mystique thought she caught one brief flicker of fear in the nurse's eyes before the biddable and friendly fuzziness closed over them again. Mystique glanced quickly at Emma, wanting reassurance that everything was under control, but Emma was staring intently down the hall and did not turn.

When Azazel wheeled the chair up to Mystique she sank down into it gratefully, though she felt a bit silly allowing herself to be pushed along when she felt perfect capable of walking under her own power (thoughts of Charles tried to intrude here, but she did her best to push them away and focus on the business at hand).

They went on, Emma walking point, casting her influence over the people around them like a fisherman with a net.

Azazel leaned low over the back of the wheelchair as he pushed Mystique along, almost slinking, his eyes tracking every source of movement to glare suspiciously at everyone they passed. He was on the verge of panic, she saw, so she reached backwards to put her own hand over his.

It was bizarre – and yes, frightening – to be wearing her own skin in public, yet few people were paying the four of them any mind. The few who did look their way smiled knowingly. _Look at the mama-to-be,_ Mystique supposed they were thinking, _Look at how nervous and protective the daddy is, poor old fellow looks so high-strung he might jump out of his own skin_.

"Are you making them look human?" Erik asked Emma softly, and beneath her own hand Mystique felt Azazel clutch the handle of the wheelchair more tightly, saw his lip curl to flash teeth, and she found that his sense of disgust at the idea was her own.

As for herself, passing for human was nothing new – it was part of her ability, after all, and in the very least she was used to it. But the idea of Azazel made to look normal – made to look _average_ – struck her as being very nearly an abomination. He was more than his skin – they both were – and yet the thought of his mutation being striped away from him, even as a simple illusion born of convenience, felt like a violation of everything that he was.

She was relieved when Emma shook her head. "Too much work, that," she said. "I'm just making it so the sapiens don't care about how they look."

"Sapiens?" Erik repeated dryly, and it occurred to Mystique that was the first time she had ever seen him smile in response to something Emma had said. "I like that... it sounds a bit less pulp fiction than 'the humans,' doesn't it?"

They went on down the hall, and after a little while Azazel stood a bit straighter. He walked more loosely, no longer moving like a coiled spring, and – astonishingly – when people smiled at him he began to smile back.

"Congratulations!" a wizened little nun squeaked out at them from her own wheelchair when they passed in the hall, and Mystique was surprised to hear herself mumble almost shyly, "Thank you."

She thought about how much easier things would be, if life could be like this everyday. How much kinder might they all be, if they could afford it?

Then they came to the right room, and Emma lead them inside and closed the door behind them. A nurse was already waiting for them – Emma's work, of course – and she held Mystique's arm as she move from the chair to the bed, pausing midway to work through another contraction. "That one was bigger," Mystique told her, a bit astonished, and the nurse smiled reassuringly and patted her hand.

Emma stood back, watching the four of them. She turned her eyes on Azazel, pointed toward the corner of the room. "You're invisible now," she told him sharply. "Stay out of the way."

Azazel's eyes widened, as though she'd suddenly slapped him, then they narrowed. He glared at her, taking it all as spite and punishment, which it was probably was... though later Mystique would wonder if it wasn't that Emma had already over-stressed herself by that point, if the strain hadn't already been getting to be too much.

"Emma –" Mystique started to say, wanting to argue, hoping to reason with her. _I want him over here, beside me,_ she wanted to say. _I need to hold his hand for this_.

But Emma cut her off before she could stay any of that. "Don't argue with me now," she said, warningly, and Mystique wasn't sure if it was a psychic command or simply fear that Emma would decide not to help after all that made her fall silent.

Azazel spit something at Emma in Russian, employing words which neither he nor Erik had taught Mystique, but he turned and went to the corner she had indicated.

"Yeah, you're a real sweetheart, too," Emma said absently, brushing the hair out of her eyes.

When the obstetrician arrived a short while later, Mystique was startled but pleased to find that she was a woman. She could not remember ever meeting a female doctor before, and Mystique found herself liking the dark-haired stick of woman very quickly. It seemed to Mystique as well that this feeling was mutual, and Mystique told herself that this was only Emma's influence on her, that if the young doctor could see her as she really was she would run screaming from the room, but nonetheless Mystique felt as though she could trust her. She answered the doctor's questions readily.

"Is this the daddy?" the doctor asked, nodding toward Erik. In the corner, Azazel coughed – loudly and pointedly, and Mystique thought fast.

"No," she said. "My brother," and Erik smiled easily and added, "Younger brother, of course."

The doctor, who introduced herself as Dr. Baker, got on with the examination. "Looking good so far," she told Mystique, after a few minutes. "This isn't too bad, is it?" and Mystique agreed that really it was not. Mystique had some say herself in that, of course; it was within the realm of her ability to make this business a deal easier for herself, and she'd done her research ahead of time. Mystique had studied books on human anatomy, had noted that a wide pelvis could make delivery easier, and had equipped herself accordingly. The rest was a matter of tendons and muscles expanding to widen the birth canal, and while she had imperfect control over her internal anatomy, she was able to make it all a bit less difficult.

An orderly came into the room, carrying a stack of bedding in his arms, heading toward the closet. Emma startled at his arrival, and Mystique had the bad impression that the man had snuck up on her somehow, but he seemed entirely obvious the fact that anything out of the ordinary was going on in the room. The orderly would have run straight into Azazel if he hadn't stepped out of his path.

"Is he meant to be in here?" Erik asked flatly, and Mystique wasn't certain if he was addressing the doctor or Emma, but Dr. Baker turned to look around at the question.

"Absolutely not," she said, her voice just as dangerous as Erik's own. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" she demanded of the orderly, but the man did not respond. He went on with his work, stacking the pile of linens in the closet.

 _He doesn't see any of us_ , Mystique realized with sudden horror. That wasn't right – something was wrong, and she turned quickly to look to Emma, turned in time to see Emma raise her hands to her forehead in a feeble, baffled gesture, as though in response to some inexplicable pain. She saw Emma sway and then crumple, her eyes rolling up into her skull as she fell, and all of their disguises came tumbling down along with her, as the orderly began to yell.

Author's note: Hey. just wanted to thank everyone for all of the lovely comments the last chapter received. They all mean quite a lot to me, and they've really inspired me to keep pounding away at this thing. You're all awesome people.

There's three more chapters left to DEVIL (at which point I'll begin work on the next story in the series, FATE, which will pick up about a year after where DEVIL leaves off) and I'm HOPING to be able to add a new chapter once a week (or at the very least, every-other week) from now on, barring finals and other acts of nature.


	48. Chapter 48

" _The state of being alone is not meant to bring to mind merely a rustic musing beside some silver lake. The aloneness of which I speak is much more like the aloneness of birth or death. It is like the fearless alone that one sees in the eyes of someone who is suffering, whom we cannot help. Or it is like the aloneness of love, the force and mystery that so many have extolled and so many have cursed, but which no one has ever understood or ever really been able to control." - James Baldwin_  


" _Terrible things happen to good people everyday. Consequentially I am not one of the good people. I am one of the terrible things." - Marianna Paige_  


* * *

An instant after all of their disguises fell apart, Erik's hand closed around the doctor's forearm. It happened with such speed that Mystique was not certain as to how he had even come to stand so close to the woman. "Don't scream," he cautioned her serenely.

The doctor did not answer. Her eyes were fixed on Mystique. Those eyes were very large, and under their gaze Mystique felt an instinct to cover up, to hide, to crawl inside the safety of the old Raven-skin.

Behind then, the nurse suddenly broke and ran for the door, and with an almost lazily ease Erik flicked his free hand backwards, and Mystique felt the sub-audible _thuuum_ of his power going out from him as the door handle began to drip and run. When the nurse's fingers brushed against the bubbling hot metal she drew her hand away with a choked cry. And it was only then that the orderly looked up from what he was doing.

He began to turn, concern creasing his narrow face, and then his eyes fell on Azazel. The man's mouth dangled open for just an instant, and then he began to shout. "Oh lord, the devil's –" he started, and then Azazel's tail snaked out, twining around the orderly's ankle and yanking him off his feet before coiling around his neck, cutting off anymore cries along with his air.

The nurse had sunk to the ground in front of the sealed door, where she was sobbing softly and inconsolably, clutching her burned hand at the wrist and watching Azazel with eyes as wide as peeled eggs. Mystique thought that was somehow much worse than the orderly's shouting. What could you possibly say to a person who ran crying from the simple sight of you and the people you loved?

There was an insult in that crying that hurt in a raw, skinless way, in a way that Mystique found provoked in herself not pity but rage so deep that she was badly frighten that she might drown in it. She found without very much surprise that she didn't care in the slightest was happened to the nurse or the orderly – to any of them, really.

 _None of this had to happen_ , she thought, watching the orderly claw at the inexorable coil of red muscle around his neck as his own face went from red to purple, listening to the nurse crying, feeling the doctor's eyes on her. _None of this would have happened, if they could just fucking_ look _at us without screaming or running in terror_ , and she ground her teeth together as a new contraction seized her.

When Erik spoke, Mystique heard everything that was in her own heart in his voice, tightly controlled as it was, and she loved him for that. "This shouldn't be allowed to get any messier than it already is," he advised Azazel.

"There is nice warm barn in upstate New York," Azazel answered. "Not very many telephones up there."

It took Mystique a moment to see what the two of them were driving at, but when she understood she saw how smart it was. Missing people or dead bodies would have demanded an answer, and it wouldn't be wise to encourage the police or the press to nose around looking for one so close to home. On the other hand, if a couple of hospital employees wandered into some one-light town tomorrow night with sore feet and a crazy story... well, that would _also_ provoke questions, but of the sort that were easy to discard by dint of their very craziness.

"I think that will do to keep them out of trouble," Erik agreed.

Azazel nodded, then uncoiled his tail from around the orderly's neck. He took the man by the forearm instead, hauling him to his feet then leading him over to the door, where the nurse still cowered.

"Comrade," he said, holding his hand out to the woman, and it was strange, Mystique thought, knowing what he was capable of, that Azazel could sound so much kinder than she felt. She didn't know where he found the patience. But the nurse would not take it, and in the end he bent over beside her and closed a hand over her shoulder. The three of them disappeared.

Erik's hand was still curled around the doctor's forearm. After Azazel had gone, he turned back to her and told her very calmly, "I need to know whether you intend to hurt my sister or her baby." That word – sister – rolled off his lips without affect or hesitation.

The woman's eyes came back to Mystique. "Please," Mystique said, and another contraction gripped her, the first one to truly and really _hurt_ , and she gritted her teeth and road through it but god she hated it. She hated being this vulnerable and desperate and _scared_.

"I am a _professional_ ," the doctor snapped at Erik, jerking her arm away from his touch."It is my job to take care of mothers and infants and since there is a mother and an infant here which need to be taken care of that is my primary concern at the moment." She spoke very quickly and forcefully, and Mystique supposed that was her way of attempting to control the situation, to manage her own fear.

"However, " the doctor continued, "your other friend appears to be in dire need of immediate medical attention –"

Erik stepped away, crouching down beside Emma. _Oh god,_ Mystique thought, craning her head to see, _we forgot all about Emma. How did we forget about Emma?_ She had collapsed with neck bent at an awkward angle, and Erik turned her over onto her back careful, cradling her head so it wouldn't knock against the hard floor. Her hair was dull and brittle. The flesh had melted off her, and her arms were sticks.

"Is she dead?" Mystique asked, and after a moment's consideration Erik shook his head no. She still didn't stir, but Mystique could see her chest rising and falling slowly.

Azazel returned then. He took everything in with eyes which were suddenly very large – and Mystique though, frightened – and an instant later he crouched down beside Erik. Their voices were low, and Mystique could not make out exactly what they were saying to each other. Erik sounded very calm, but in Azazel's voice there was hurt and confusion and anger.

After a short time, Erik stood, stepping away from the two of them. Azazel put one hand behind Emma's spindly neck, supporting her head as though she were an infant, and closed his other hand around her forearm. Mystique saw Emma's arm was so thin that Azazel's hand could go all the way around it.

The two of them teleported away, and Azazel was gone longer this time, for fifteen minutes or so. While he was away, the doctor moved in to examine Mystique.

The doctor could say whatever she wanted about professional dedication, but Mystique believed that there was a hesitancy to touch her that was not there before, a sense of revulsion, and she hated – resented – the feel of the doctor's hands, even gloved in latex, between her thighs.

Azazel reappeared at the bedside, so near to Mystique that little puffs of the cloud of smoke that accompanied his return swirled in front of her eyes. She reached out and took his hand, squeezing it gratefully, and felt him squeeze back.

"Luke and Matthew are looking after Emma," he said. "But I don't understand –"

"Later," Mystique said. "Later, okay, please?" and he fell silent, thought she could see that he was still struggling with it, still trying to discover what it was that he had missed, how whatever it was that was happening with Emma had come to happen and why.

And things proceeded.


	49. Chapter 49

" _For here you were... here you were: to be loved. To be loved, baby, hard, at once, and forever, to strengthen you against the loveless world. Remember that: I know how black it looks today, for you. It looked bad that day, too, yes, we were trembling. We have not stopped trembling yet, but if we had not loved each other none of us would have survived. And now you must survive because we love you, and for the sake of your children and your children's children." - James Baldwin_  


* * *

When the doctor drew the baby from between Mystique's legs and lifted him away from her body, she felt herself gripped by suspicious panic. "No," she said, reaching out. She could hear the menace in her own voice. "No. Give him back to me. Give him to me now."

"In just a minute," the doctor said, stepping away from the bed with the child in her arms. Her body was between Mystique and the baby. Mystique couldn't see him at all – couldn't see what the doctor was doing with him – and that made the panic grow so much stronger.

The doctor stopped at a stainless steel exam table, and she was doing something with the baby there, but Mystique still couldn't _see_ , and when the silence suddenly registered with her it was like the twist of a knife. _He's so quiet,_ she thought. _Why is he so quiet – aren't they supposed to cry?_

And on the very heels of that she thought, with absolute certainty: _He's not breathing. The baby's not breathing – he's dead – that's why he hasn't cried_. And later – three challenging years which she would not have traded for anything, even as badly as they hurt in retrospect – she would come to believe that in this instant she had experienced not a moment of fear-induced paranoia, but a premonition just as real as any of Irene's visions.

And maybe Erik was thinking something similar – thinking that something was _wrong_ – because he followed the doctor. He came around on the other side of the table, and Mystique watched him as he frowned while he watched intently whatever it was that the doctor was doing. Mystique could not see what was happening herself – the angle was wrong – but she could see the doctor's arms moving, and she believed that she could see tension in the muscles of the woman's neck.

The silence seemed to go on and on forever, but then there was a squawk, followed by a squalling cry, and Mystique saw Erik's face break apart in the widest, most relieved, silliest goddamn _grin_.

That grin held Mystique's attention for a long moment, and when she finally glanced back to the doctor she saw something metal and sharp glittering in her hand. Azazel, who had up until this point remained very still and silent beside her, released Mystique's hand and was moving forward with deadly intent even before she shouted out, "Erik, no, stop her –"

Erik sidestepped quickly but calmly to put himself into Azazel's path, laying his hand on the other man's shoulder to bring him to a halt. "It's alright, Raven," Erik said evenly. "She's just cutting the cord."

He patted Azazel twice on the back before dropping his arm, a gesture that somehow reminded Mystique forcefully of her brother. Azazel returned to her side, almost sheepishly. Mystique wondered if the doctor understood how close things had come to becoming violent.

A few minutes later, the doctor turned and carried the baby to Mystique, and put him into her arms, and Mystique drew him against her body wonderingly, marveling over every bit of him while he blinked his smokey and inscrutable eyes against the light. She ran a finger over the baby's downy cheek, feeling the softness of the powder blue fur, still damp. The curly hair at the crown of his head was darker and astonishingly thick for a newborn. His tail was twice the length of his body, its scalloped tip rounded and blunt, very different from the deadly sharp spearhead at the end of Azazel's tail.

He was so small, the weight of him fragile and bird-like, such an unsubstantial vessel for all the hopes and dreams of his parents and his species.

Mystique felt the weight of Azazel's hand on her shoulder, and she tore her eyes away from the baby to look up at him. He was watching the pair of them with a proud and fearsome sort of love, and in that moment it seemed to Mystique that there was nothing in the world that they were not strong enough to face together.

After a few minutes, Azazel reached out tentatively, nudging one of the baby's wrinkled little hands with his index finger, running the pad of his finger across the inside of the baby's naked palm. The baby's three-fingered hand closed around his finger, its grip dogged if not powerful, and Azazel's face lit up with astonished pleasure.

When Mystique looked up again she saw the doctor, watching them with a strange expression on her face. Mystique felt vulnerable again – too exposed, too easy hurt – as she stared back at the other woman, wondering what the doctor was thinking. Wondering also what – if anything – she owed the woman for simply being decent enough help in her time of need rather than shrinking away in horror or disgust, for refraining from bashing the child's head against the floor.

What debt, really, did Mystique owe the doctor for rendering the sort of care for herself and her infant that any sapiens woman might have taken absolutely for granted? The unfairness of it was galling, but Mystique suspected that she very likely owed the doctor a great deal.

"What's his name?" the doctor asked.

"Kurt," Mystique said, and heard something almost like shyness in her own voice. She had come to this conclusion spontaneously, remembering the old man who loved Erik so well, and the moment she had spoken she knew that it right. She looked to Azazel for agreement, and watched him nod, a smile tugging at one side of his mouth.

"He's lovely," the doctor said, and that was startling, because Mystique found that she could not doubt the woman's sincerity, and moreover she believed absolutely in the truth of her words, but yet it never would have occurred to her to think that a human would see things that way.

Mystique wondered just how badly she had misread the woman, how much she might have gotten wrong. There was a _thank you_ trapped somewhere inside her throat, but she couldn't seem to jar it free.

On the other side of the door, someone rattled the door handle. When the door didn't open, whoever was out there tried knocking, and then she raised her voice in question. Before very long there were other voices, and now someone was pounding on the door insistently.

"Time to go," Erik said.

So they did.


	50. Chapter 50

_People sometimes ask me,"If things are so bad, why don't you just kill yourself?" The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, satisfaction, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. We are really fucked. Life is still really good. - Derrick Jensen_

* * *

In those first early days following his birth, it seemed as though Kurt, tiny as he was, possessed some great power over the rest of them. He drew the others to them, a long procession of visitors to Mystique's bedside who came like supplicates before the altar of Future Hopes, evoking wonder in those whom it might have been thought not enough softness existed to find wonder in an infant.

Kurt was the first – at least as far as could be ascertained. He was the first Mutant to be born to Mutant parents, and they all believed then that he would be the first Mutant child to be reared from infancy in the community of other Mutants.

The idea of growing up in the company of one's own, of never having to believe your young self to be alone... it had a bitter, sentimental ache to it, and Mystique saw half a doze aborted childhoods weighing heavily on the minds of her comrades as they came by to visit over the course of that full day with the new baby. They looked at him, and they saw something they wanted to protect, and Mystique loved them all for it.

Mystique understood that the baby was not a panacea. She was riding on a tide of good feelings right now, a surge of hope and happiness that was not especially rational, but she had decided not to resist, to go with the flow of things. She understood that life for the innocuous little ball of blue in her arms could be nothing but perilous, and she understood that he would only multiply the complications and dangers in their lives, but that problem was to be addressed later.

For the time being, she watched with a contented and beatific sort of smugness, as the baby drew them all together, like a needle knitting together diasporic bits of cloth, silk and sequin and burlap layered together against the cold. She watched, and she began to see that the thing she had barely dared to long for had come true; they were family here.

Not just herself and Azazel and Kurt. All of them together were family now.

And she knew (who could have known better, really?) that the fact that they had become family did not mean that they would be good to each other, that they would understand one another or refrained from tearing each other down. It did not mean that they would not go hard at each other, or that they would see eye to eye or love each other well or all of the time. It did not make them immune to betrayal.

They were damaged and they were different from one another and they were in so many ways entirely too experienced at hurting others and being hurt. They could at best be only a little better than the world that had spawned them, and the world was a very ugly place.

Nonetheless – family.

Fred could not dare himself to touch the child, full of fear that his out-sized hands would crush something that small, though Mystique had seen his fingers move delicately enough to execute the shelling of quails' eggs. Toad was bolder, hopping right up into the bed beside Mystique to stroke the top of Kurt's head as though he were a kitten. Mystique was still waiting to see how things would shape out between Toad and the new baby; she thought a certain degree of jealousy might be desirable – it would at least mean that Toad had developed some degree of attachment to her – but she did not want for him to fell betrayed or replaced.

Janos hung back carefully, as he always did in the face of situations which left him feeling rather stronger emotions than he felt were safe to express. Angel didn't usually have any interest in children, but she had stayed long enough to play with Kurt's clever little hands to and to remark upon the fact that he had Raven's nose. She was in a good enough mood that she even tolerated a certain amount of ribbing from Matthew about it being her turn next before finally telling him where he could stick it. Mystique had only seen around the edges of Janos and Angel's relationship – Angel was reticent and after that one long conversation Janos had gone back into almost total verbal lock down – but she knew it was fraught with complications.

Matthew's stupid mouth aside, the twins has a certain amount of experience with babies, owing to their having helped out with their little sister. They were a great help, but Erik was invaluable.

Mystique and Azazel had both read voraciously over the course of her pregnancy, devouring between them childcare guides in three languages as though arming themselves against disaster, but all of this had been of dubious use once the baby had really and actually come, real and in the flesh and terrifying in his helplessness.

Erik rolled up his sleeves and stepped in, demonstrating the finer points of bathing and diapering and a thousand other things. Mystique watched him, moving with the same confidence and competence that he brought to any task, and wondered against about the photo she had seen in his uncle's apartment. That waifish woman and the dark-haired child. She supposed that she could guess who they had been... but where were they now?

Erik's sewing machine had made a reappearance, producing diapers and footie pajamas with special modifications for Kurt's unique anatomy. Azazel was enlisted to oversee the design of tail slits, and it was due to this that they had dodged a real bullet.

"I think our Erik must be color blind," Azazel told her that night in bed, after his consultation with Erik, and she'd felt his chuffing laughter against her ear as he described the pallete Erik might have chosen if left to his own devices.

She'd fallen asleep with the baby cradled in the recess of her arms, Azazel's firm weight pressed against her back. His arm was draped over her, long tapered fingers with the calloused pads folded over her own hand, and below that, Kurt's thin fluttering chest. Her thought before she went under was, _This is good. This is really, really good._

Mystique might have been afraid to sleep with the baby in the bed with her, might have worried about flailing in the night, of striking out at her ghosts and hurting Kurt instead. But the nightmares had ended at the same time Emma had revealed to their cause. It was as though Emma had drawn an arrow from the flesh of Mystique's psyche. It had hurt coming out – Emma had meant for it to hurt, but probably this could not have been prevented even if she had wanted to – but once removed there had been a chance for the wound to heal. The metaphysical scar tissue that had grown in its place was dull to feeling and somewhat twisted, but Mystique found it preferable to an open wound.

Emma was the dangling thread now, the bit of care-worn bleached leather that had refused to knit itself to the rest of the tapestry.

Emma had taken to her room after the nearly catastrophic trip to the hospital, had been refusing – forcefully – visitors.

Mystique put it off as long as she reasonably could, but on the third day she bundled Kurt up in his baby blue blanket for a trip out into the halls, and went to visit Emma.

 **Author's note:** Sorry about the delay on this one, guys. But the final chapter should be up tomorrow.


	51. Coda

_Nearly everyone has his box of secret pain, shared with no one. - John Steinbeck_

* * *

 

It might have been very easy, in the weeks and months following Kurt's birth, for Mystique to avoid Emma's sick room almost entirely.

The others would not have held it against Mystique – quite to the contrary, in fact. Most of the Brotherhood had learned to keep their distance from Emma long before her illness had become common knowledge, and this was a status quo which Emma had gone out of her way to reinforce since that night in the hospital. She was bitter and vicious and emotionally unwell, and nothing about the cancer had done anything to change that.

Still, in many cases a sincere effort had been made to provide her some sort of comfort or support, especially by the newer recruits, the ones who hadn't been around long enough to really understand what Emma was. With few exceptions, only Mystique's overtures were met with anything short of complete rejection.

Fred had come bearing gifts of food meant to strengthen or comfort or distract, and Matthew and Luke had brought advice and sympathy hard won during their sister's protracted and ultimately futile battle with leukemia. Toad came to stare, mostly, taking in the new situation, measuring the mood in the room and between the adults with those great glassy eyes and keeping his evaluations to himself. Of the four, only Toad was received with any degree of tolerance, and even that was extremely limited. It hadn't taken the other three long to take the hint. They stopped coming.

Erik did not bother. He seemed to have written Emma off completely, and Mystique supposed that was fair; she did not believe that Erik was obligated to forgive her. Sometimes he would drop loaded comments about Mystique's visits with Emma in the middle of conversations, but he left her free to make her own choices and her own mistakes.

Mystique supposed that she had chosen her affinities wrongly, that the amount of time she was spending with Emma had made her extremely suspect in the eyes of some of the others – especially Janos, and through him, Angel.

 _It is only temporary,_ she wanted to tell them all, but how could that make up for the very personal ways Emma had tormented Janos, for her knowing complicity in everything Shaw had been? Mystique did not want to find herself caught in the trap of making excuses for Emma's sins.

 _But someone has to be with her_ , she thought, in her own defense. _Emma can't be left alone with this,_ but was that even true? Emma was like a sick animal, withdrawn into its lair. Most of the time she acted as though there was nothing she would like more than for Mystique to leave her alone.

It was only rarely, in the weak moments when Emma let her shields slip, that Mystique got a sense of how hideously lonely Emma really was.

So Mystique sat with Emma, barely tolerated, tolerating the insults and abuses, but they both knew that she wasn't driven to do so out of pure pity or kindness or a sense of Mutant solidarity. Her motives were more complex than that.

"Your problem," Emma told Mystique from her sick bed, after this all had been going on for a number of months, "is that you expect answers." Weak as her body might have become, Emma's voice remained light and airy, almost gentle in its detachment, but the words were calculated to cut.

Mystique didn't bother to vocalize a denial. She frowned.

"Oh, you don't think that the others are entitled to answers – not automatically, at least. That's why you kept quiet about my little problem as long as you did," she went on, her lilting voice quick and light and dripping careless poison. In Emma's arms, Kurt cooed worriedly, and a thin smile spread across her parchment lips as she looked down at him.

That was something, anyway. The baby had a way of getting through her defenses – at least sometimes – so that meant she couldn't be entirely bad, right?

It was only for a moment.

"The others haven't been patient like you have, have they? They haven't kept _secrets_ the way you have, as self-serving as your reasons might have been. But you've put in the time, you've waited patiently, so you think that you deserve to know _why_.

"Worse than that, you think I want to tell you. You think that if you're patient and helpful enough, if you just wait for me to come around, to feel _safe_ enough in your presence or desperate enough to talk to _someone_ , eventually I'll spill my guts to you."

Mystique didn't argue with Emma's assessment. There would have been no point. She waited.

"Take him back," Emma commanded imperiously, and Mystique stood to do so. "Infants are vile," Emma added, as Mystique settled back into her chair with Kurt resting in the crook of her arm, and Mystique felt herself bristle.

"Oh lord. Not yours specifically," Emma added dismissively. "They have gray minds – it's almost as bad as animals. He wants to feed."

"I know that," Mystique said, an edge to her voice. Kurt squirmed uncomfortably in her arms. She draped a light tea towel over her shoulder to cover herself, manifested a nipple, lifted Kurt up to nurse. The back of his head ballooned the thin square of linen outward.

In some ways, Kurt was precarious. He was only two months old, yet he seemed hyper attuned to the moods of people around them, to the point that Mystique had begun to wonder (incorrectly, as it would turn out) if he didn't possess some degree of telepathic or empathic ability. He hated to be put down, preferring to have someone to cling to hands and feet, like a small monkey, and his grip was powerful. Yet he remained small. Fey. Fragile-seeming. It seemed to Mystique that he was not putting on weight the way he should have been. And he cried only rarely, a weedy and particular mewling. He worried her.

Emma was watching her. "Most of the men here think you're naked all the time," she informed Mystique.

Mystique snorted, rolled her eyes to show what she thought of that.

Underneath the heavy layer of blankets, Emma crossed her legs. She took up the thread of the previous conversation without preamble. "You think that it will be like it was with Janos, that some dam will burst and in the end I will tell you everything. You think that I will go on and on and one until I give you some excuse to like me despite yourself.

"Sorry to disappoint, hon."

After a long moment, Emma went on. "Janos lied to you about quite a lot, you know – he lied to make himself look better and because he's not brave enough to face up to the truth." Mystique shrugged the shoulder opposite of Kurt; she had guessed as much for herself. It didn't bother her more than a little.

"The most egregious lies concern the death of Colonel Hendry, whose name he hasn't even managed to remember correctly. First of all, Janos overestimates Azazel's attachment to the man; Azazel makes friends with surprising ease for a man of his habits and appearance, but he doesn't usually become _close_ to people... Congratulations on making it over that barrier, by the way." There was a note of resentment in Emma's voice – directed at Azazel or Mystique or them both, she couldn't say – but Mystique chose to ignore it. Emma looked her over shrewdly and upped the ante. "Though I imagine that has more to do with the color and texture of your skin than anything else."

"What is with telepaths?" Mystique asked rhetorically. She matched Emma's tone, which was like an icy scalpel, with prefect precision, though she used her own voice. "You're worse than Charles. You have actually no idea what's going on with the people around you at any given time, do you?

"You're inching up on a line you don't want to cross, by the way," she added, with a dangerous sort of carelessness.

Emma moved on to her next point without comment, which, Mystique thought, might even mean that Emma had taken her threat seriously.

"Janos might have pitied – related to, you could even say – that greedy little sapiens man. Certainly, the feelings are complex, and Janos' mind is quite the tangled mess. But do you know what Janos did when Hendry pulled his sad little weapon on Shaw, as though he thought Shaw was someone who could be intimidated by something as silly as a hand grenade?"

"Of course I don't," Mystique, who had never so much as met the late Colonel, said, politely neglecting to mention that it had been something far less impressive than a hand grenade – a small silver coin – that had brought Shaw down. Backed, of course, by all of Erik's force of will.

"Well, first he became scared, because Janos is in his center a coward. But after that he smirked – he almost laughed! Don't doubt me, I was there.

"And none of that was an act for Shaw's sake, though very often he tried to match his reactions to Shaw's. He believe Shaw was actually paying attention to him – very self-important, our Janos is – and thought that he would be less likely to find himself in trouble if he did so..." Emma paused, frowning; often these days she seemed to loose track of her train of thought. "It was pure _schadenfreude_. Relief at seeing that the person who had fucked up so badly wasn't him.

"The world makes people hard," Emma said, and that was the closest to an admission of anything that she would ever come. "You've learned a little bit about that. You'll learn a great deal more, I suppose, or else you'll die." She spoke as though she had very little investment in the matter one way or the other, and Mystique supposed she didn't; it wasn't Emma's look-out, after all. She wouldn't be there for that bit.

Arguing felt like the best course of action. "It wasn't the world that pushed Janos to that point. It was Shaw."

"Don't be stupid. Shaw was reflective of the world."

Mystique didn't say anything to that. She was perfectly still, waiting. _Now she will talk about him – about all of it_ , she thought expectantly, but she tried to keep that thought very quiet.

There were dead leaves in Emma's laugh, used up and rotting. "You don't have the slightest idea what _pushes_ Janos. Or Azazel, or Erik, or any of the people here – probably yourself most of all.

"You want exonerating evidence, mitigating circumstances, something to make the fact that I went to such extremes understandable and – most of all – forgivable. You want me to tell you about a ruined childhood, you want me to say that I was abused or manipulated or raped, or that Shaw tricked me somehow, played me for a fool, pulled one over on me. You want me to say that I turned my back on the world because the world turned against me. You want me to be pitiful.

"But I'm not like Janos, and I'm not like you, or Angel, or even Erik. I'm not the victim – I'm not the one who gets hurt, I'm the one who makes other people hurt. I've more in common with Azazel than any of you in that –"

Emma stopped suddenly, with a sharp intake of breath. Until recently, the pain had not been very bad for her – she had ways of managing it, of shutting off the parts of her brain that insisted that pain mattered – but more and more, as the weeks had gone by, her ability had begun to fail her. When that happened, the pain was very bad, though perhaps not as bad as her fear and confusion in the face of the sudden silence of any other mental voices.

Emma clutched with clawed hands at her blankets, and Mystique waited for her to recover herself. She did not comment on any of the sad ironies associated with that last, unfinished thought.

When Emma spoke again, it was to say, " _We_ have to be pitiful for _you_ so you can love us, because that's the only way you can remember why you need to hate _them_."

She thought about Agent Platt, who'd been so happy to know them and who'd died so badly at Azazel's hands, of Erik's uncle Kurt, who'd done his best to do right by the hurting boy that Erik had been and in so many ways still ways, about the doctor who'd looked down at her little blue wisp of a baby and said, _He's lovely_. Weighed that all against possibility of her own destruction, or of Azazel, or any of her comrades. Weighed Kurt's life against the few decent humans she'd come across, on a planet of six billion.

It was, all and all, a simple equation, if not entirely painless. It did not matter, really, that it proved Emma's point exactly.

"I don't need you to remind me of anything," she told Emma, and she had gotten up and left very quickly, before she could say something cruel. She understood by then that the war was coming, and that peace would not be an option given to them, but she was unwilling to throw her own life away the way Emma had, trying to force an early confrontation.

Mystique had debated on staying away after that, as it was very obvious that no answers would be forthcoming, and she now felt that even desiring them left her compromised, but in the end she had returned. She felt that she had very little choice in the matter; Emma needed someone, as much as she pretended that she did not, and by then it was becoming quite impossible for her to take care of herself.

Eventually, Azazel began to come around as well. He'd approached Emma in his forthright way, bearing a gigantic pure white feather the length of his arm – an object which obviously had its origins in the Savage Land – as a peace offering. But Azazel was as inexperienced with forgiveness as he was any complex social interaction, and Emma had been disinclined to smooth the way for him. Azazel only had to be told to leave once.

It was impossible to tell what – if anything – Emma regretted.

The feather had somehow ended up in Toad's possession – though if he had stolen it or Emma had given it away Mystique was never sure – and he had not been able to resist playing too roughly with the lovely thing. It had ended up in tatters, its silky filaments scattered around the headquarters' courtyard.

The weeks went by, every day with Kurt was a new discovery, and one morning she had gone up to Emma's room with him, but Emma wasn't there anymore. There was only an empty body.

After that, there had been two unmarked graves in the courtyard.

And things went on.

END.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Author's Note: DEVIL is finished, but it was only the first of three stories dealing in the history of Mystique and the Brotherhood. The first chapter of the next story, which will begin a few years after DEVIL left off, will be appearing on my account as soon as possible under the title FATE.


End file.
